I switched careers in my 40s. While I still do many of the same tasks I did before, half a decade later, I'm engaging with a whole new set of people. I’m really thankful for the way it helped me see how much of my thinking was shaped by the people I interacted with. Truthfully, I switched careers because I needed health insurance for my family and a better wage. If the Devil had been hiring, I wouldn’t have looked twice because my family needed me. Necessity generally vanquishes uncertainty. When you have to do it, you don’t wonder.
But as an old dog who forced herself to learn new tricks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of change. In my old career, or something, I told every new intern that change is the only constant, and so flexibility should be your tool for survival. Many self-help books and business manuals extol the virtues of a growth mindset. I find the term unnecessarily capitalist. As if our minds must grow year over year so our shareholders can profit from our intellectual labor. Our intellectual output has not gone IPO. More is not necessarily better. Scaling thought isn't the goal for becoming the person you want to be. As someone raised by a generation of feminists who thought career, house, and children were feasible and doable for the strong woman, I framed success as full-time work and parenthood. In adulthood, I love my children, and I enjoy work, but I’ve come to realize my real pleasure comes from thought. When I disentangled my employment from my passion for art, I freed myself from some of the constraints my previous museum career imposed on my thinking.
We live in an incredibly siloed society. People often interact with the same group of people repeatedly. Those people are either nearby or work with you. The Internet of People, while real, is virtual, so it blurs the line between imaginary and actual. You can have valid interactions with people online, but the online world creates an illusion of closeness that facilitates connections that don't exist. So while ideas you hear online can spark your thoughts, the depth needed to transform your intellect isn't feasible online. You might say I’ve watched all million of your videos; I think you’ve made me think differently. To that, I would say no; you thought differently because you chose to watch those videos. You already had the aptitude to connect to the ideas. Online connections can spark thought, but people in real life can foster completely different mindsets.
The online world is largely about framing something that catches your attention. It’s chopped up into dynamic chunks with specific formatting hooks. Most videos focus on a specific idea, get straight to the point, and leave.
Real people often don’t get to the point, sometimes don’t leave, and very often talk around their meaning. People are messy, and interacting with them long-term changes how your thought processes work. If I give you ideas in a video, they're basically inert until your mind picks them up and grapples with them. But if you interacted with the same people all the time, your mind would pick up every idea and deal with it the same way.
I'd say we all have a chance to break out of our comfort zones and meet people whose ideas completely transform our frameworks. In this way, I think text functions quite differently than video. Part of the reason is that text has your voice in your mind. As the reader, you're essentially translating my written words into your thoughts. Rather than the instantaneous feeling of audio or video, text feels slower, just as learning to work with somebody can feel slow.
When I taught in the galleries, I had students convince a friend to like an artwork they hated. They had to be incredibly persuasive, but it also forced them to see something outside of their original frame of reference. I loved this exercise because it really annoyed everybody. The students predictably hated many of the abstract artworks, or ones that were classically ugly. As they wrote, they developed the language they would use to describe these works and convince their friends. Their friends often did get convinced. An exercise like this is meant to put you out of your comfort zone because thinking outside of your existing frames of reference improves how you think. You can't measure the improvement. You just feel a little different. And this is where I really believe that so much of our cultural division in society is due to the fact that so many people have segregated news sources; Fox versus not Fox, which trickles down to fear or flexibility. Using art as a tool to become more intellectually flexible gives you a low-stakes chance to improve your critical thinking.
