Context is key.  While I’ve known this, I’ve struggled to understand how to communicate about PeopleCount in a way that attracts others.

The Context:

On a social media site, someone posted about a wonderful kind of event that everyone on the site had experienced. The shared experience gives us a strong sense of connectedness and relatedness. Others shared the dates and cities of their events and the names of the people who led them.

Is each leader’s name a context?  Is the leader’s personality a context?  Or is the experience a context and the names and personalities are merely reminiscent of it?  Or is the context what arose during the event, that much more is possible in the world than we previously imagined?

A Context feels Real because of the Known

Much about a context seems known. Upon reflection, though, what we know is only a tiny fraction of it. It’s like visiting a big city and being impressed by its layout and vibrance and parks and night life while knowing we barely scratched its surface.

The same is true for a person. Even a person we know well has hundreds of private thoughts every day that are invisible to us. If we ask how they slept, their world of dreams and worries is almost entirely unknown. Even a close sibling’s actual experience in a separate class is unknown. We merely assume it’s similar to our own. Or when we ask about it and they say “it sucked” or “it was okay”, thoughts and feelings arise in our mind about it, and we assume they’re accurate.

Though they’re often fuzzy, what we remember, about an event, a person, or a context seems mostly known. Each evokes myriad thoughts and feelings that we experience as if they are direct sensory input. And mostly we insist, “My feelings are valid.” We often feel sure that they tell us what’s true.

A Powerful Context is full of the Unknown

Yet what makes a context or person powerful and moving is that its limits are unknown.  This is what inspires me about my “impossible” project, PeopleCount. As I’ve explored it, it seems to have more and more potential for rearranging society in wonderful ways. In the thousands of hours I’ve put into it, the limits are far beyond anything people have ever imagined for human organization (which we call “politics”).

A Small Context is full of the Known

Maybe this is precisely why others are so uninspired by it. Most people are resigned, even cynical about politics. In their known world, like in mine before PeopleCount, the limits and problems of politics are huge and numerous.  Even when people are upbeat about politics, it usually comes from thinking they have a good chance of winning, not from realizing that there’s much more to it than they know.

Conclusion

Context is key.  But it’s not just the context, it’s the subjective world of it.

So where I see a new, infinite possibility, most people see something that probably is worthless.