Influence vs. Outfluence
On April 20th, 2024 something miraculous happened. Well, it felt like a miracle to me anyway. It’s the day my phone gave me this message:
Let me give you some context.
I’ve been pretty attached to my headphones 🎧 for a long time. I think it was late, late elementary school that I got my first Sony Walkman radio and cassette player. I liked the radio, and quickly fell in love with the weekly Top 40 shows, but then I bought my first cassette, “The Sign” by the sensational Neo-Abba Swedish pop group Ace of Base. It was the soundtrack of my 7th grade. I listened to it constantly, with my music collection growing steadily around it. The Walkman was soon replaced by an Aiwa portable CD player (and I write, rather vulnerably, about my love affair with CD players in The Complete Science of Human Dynamics). After visiting my incredibly warm and intelligent uncle in Costa Rica and witnessing the breadth and grandeur of his momentous classical music collection, I became a serious collector myself. This, as much as anything else, carried me to my music degree a few years later.
In graduate school I joined the “Cult of Mac”, acquiring a MacBook and iPod, and proceeded to digitize my entire record collection, compressing it into the music player’s 80 gigabyte hard drive so that I could take it everywhere I went. How glorious 🤩
The iPod led me to another fixture in my content consumption, podcasts. I remember listening to my first ever podcasts about religion and politics just as I was finishing graduate school. Truly a profound media innovation, podcasting bypasses the unyielding application processes of institutional distribution, and replacing it with other, more democratic, promotional challenges. Never has it been so easy to sample so many ideas and points of view, for better or worse. The internet is truly the printing press 2.0.
From that point on, podcasts were a constant companion, accompanying me during walks, bike rides, drives, chores and other light work, down time, sleep, and so many other activities. Eventually the advent of Bluetooth technology and integration of audio software with smartphone technology would make this even more present ubiquitous in my personal sphere. I would structure my day around podcasts. I almost had a sense of responsibility around getting through my queue, and enjoyed a (small) sense of accomplishment every time I finished one. The queue would grow, then recede, then grow some more, bouncing back and forth between mere hours and multiple days. Sometimes the end of the queue would appear on the horizon, tantalizing me with the promise of freedom, only to explode again. Truthfully, my subconscious secretly wanted a job I could never complete. There was a significant element of “when I finish the queue, then I’ll get serious!” to my thinking. All of this made the queue seem that it was practically self-perpetuating.
And thanks to a fascinating social quality of podcasting and podcasters, the numerous collaborations and cross-promotions kept giving me new podcasters to discover, and so my queue would grow laterally as well as vertically. There are very few degrees of separation among successful podcasters. They all get around, cross-pollinate, and share audiences.
Podcasting is a fascinating and beautiful art form that taught me much and deepened my perspective in many ways on many topics. But I also knew it was a distraction, and that it was keeping me from creating my own stuff more fulsomely. Do you feel that way? Can you relate to what I’ve said here? It's not necessarily about podcasts - just anything you feel compelled, even responsible, to finish that is keeping you from doing your own work, giving you an excuse to stay in your comfort zone and avoid the challenges of creation.
My favorite personality type channel breaks people into 2048 different types, all subtypes of the original 16 Myers-Briggs types. One of their dichotomies is “consume” vs. “blast”. Blast means that one has a tendency to put things in action quickly, and without thinking too much. The liability with blast is that what they share is often shallow, quickly regurgitated, and lacking in dimension. Consume, on the other hand, means that it never feels right to act because there is always more to learn. I’ll let you guess which one you think I might be, based on what I’ve written above. According to their theory, everyone leans in one direction or the other, albeit with varying degrees of strength. On their profile, consume is one of my very strongest tendencies.
I’ve been dealing with this for my entire life. Easy to consume and learn, difficult to implement and get into action. It always feels like there's something else to learn and perfect in my personal theory of existence...
But this began to shift on April 20th. I had known the end was coming thanks to messages from Google that began to show up earlier in the year, and made a strong effort over Spring Break to get through the rest of my queue. I didn’t quite, but I got close. There was a lot to listen to, including a stimulating podcast called “Theories of Everything” which explores its titular theories in sprawling conversations with physicists, psychologists, engineers, cosmologists, and philosophers that can last anywhere between 2 and 5 hours, with the longer running times being not that uncommon. I'm a highly theoretical thinker, so it was helpful to find this channel. There is always something to add to the perpetual queue - my subconscious surreptitiously sabotages my efforts of creation through this and so much else.
Google announced that the podcasting app would go away on April 1st. I was psychologically prepared. But then…it didn’t. It still worked on April 1st! Maybe it was an April Fool’s joke, but that would be a weird joke. I think they just strategically signaled an earlier date for whatever reason. I kept listening as long as it let me, and April 20th was finally the day.
When I started to see that notification early in the year I could tell that something was shifting. I had already known that it wouldn’t be an effective life strategy for me to listen to podcasts as heavily as I have for the past handful of years, and Google's retiring of the podcast app felt like one of those signals from the universe to shift my cognitive focus. As I’ve gotten clearer on my own content I knew I would need to make more space and shift my mindset to consume less and create more. And that is indeed what I’ve noticed happening.
After Google Podcasts went away, I still had to (notice the language of responsibility!) go through the expansive YouTube queue that had accumulated, and then Netflix, the processes for which were similar but temporally compressed. And within a couple months I had completed those as well. It’s a weird non-accomplishment accomplishment. But I suppose it’s an accomplishment all the same.
And today I sit here, nothing in the queue, with only focus music in my headphones, writing this to you. It’s a good feeling and I’m excited for what is coming.
While today’s information and media landscape may be pathological and contributing to greater dysfunction than in past eras (and I’m not so sure that I grant this for numerous reasons - the health of humans and society is a dynamic and ever unsettled conversation, due simply to the nature of the spacetime that we navigate in each moment), we have a perennial condition that seeks to reconcile what I have come to call “influence and outfluence”. They will never be precisely balanced, and we must discern this constantly. As social beings, we are constantly in communication, community, and collaboration with our fellow social beings. As such, there is no self, and no other to speak of. No me or you. Just us, interfluencing one another. Somehow we all have a vision of an improved world that we work toward together. It can be no other way. Take a broad enough view and humans ultimately become a hive mind, very much like ants.
But, on the subjective individual level we need to know our proper stance at any given moment, and need to decide which way the communication should flow. Influence, or outfluence (BTW, Google Docs keeps correcting “outfluence” to “influence” - the joys of neologisms! 😆). “Influence” means “to flow in”. -fluence is all about flow. If we are influenced it means we are persuaded by the flowing in of others’ communication. If we outfluence it means we persuade others by the flowing out of our own communication. We must always engage in both simultaneously, because we are social beings, and we must persuade others in accordance with the principles of constructive society, or else it will not last. But we must persuade others, and also be persuaded ourselves, at every possible level of social connection. This judgment happens at the level of the moment, the season, and everything in between.
To put it another way, I have just completed a season of life heavy with influence, and rightly so. I’m stepping into a season of significant outfluence, and rightly so. I’ve been influenced enough for now. Time to outfluence. In time perhaps that will flip again.
How about you? Which season are you in? Which season have you come from? As the Byrds sing, quoting the Book of Ecclesiastes, “To everything (turn turn turn) there is a season (turn turn turn) and a time to every purpose under Heaven”.
What is the correct balance of influence and outfluence for you during this season of life?
Are you avoiding the answer? Do you need help looking closely at this balance so that you can unlock some kind of creative potential that you have been avoiding? Or perhaps you are acting to quickly and mindlessly, and you could use help getting the right influence to make your actions more effective and organic. Either way, I'm here to help.