I don't think I've ever had an experience that involved so many situations where I knew I should do something, but where I had to struggle to get myself to do it. It started with the big stuff: getting myself to apply for the grants to come here, accepting the DAAD grant, buying the ticket, and leaving the Brooklyn apartment for the airport.
Once I got here, it happened with almost everything I did: getting out of bed the first morning, leaving the apartment on my own the first time, buying food the first time, going to meet the conversation partners, going to buy a bike, going to check out the building where I'll be working, and (most recently) going to some place to pick up a ticket for "Lange Nacht der Opern und Theater" that I'm going to with another conversation partner and a couple of his friends.
With the last one, I wasn't completely sure if I'd found the right place, or even if I was supposed to go there to pick up the ticket, instead of somewhere else. So I actually spent a couple seconds in front of the door contemplating just getting on my bike and going home.
I guess it's just because I'm suddenly in a different setting, and so can't rely on my usual set of largely unconscious assumptions about how things work. It definitely reminds me of how I used to be terrified at the thought of calling someone I didn't know on the phone when I was, say, 10 years old. It wasn't really a matter of whether I not I knew what to expect. I did. It seemed to be more a matter whether that knowledge was already in the background of my mind in a way where I could effortlessly rely on it. And I think the same thing's true here.
(In case it sounded like it, none of this was meant in a 'fishing for sympathy' way. Life's pretty good. And tonight's theater-crawl should be awesome. I wish you were all here to join me for it!)
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I am starting to feel that whilest you are at Humbolt, center of German sociology, you should pick up a couple of soc books. You often make very aware comments that are pretty darn sociological. Not that I'm one of those academics that pushes their particular discipline upon everyone (ok, maybe just a little), but what you're talking about is heuristics - the pre-conscious ordering of expectations, the short cuts your brain makes because it "knows" what to do in a given situation. The psychologists like to claim them, but we sociologists know that heuristics are inherently social and context dependent. You're acquiring a new set of heuristics!
ReplyDelete:)
I've heard psychologists claim heuristics, though (if we're going to be fair) philosophers must have come up with it first, since, you know, 'heuristic' is a Greek word, and western philosophers invented Greece. Or maybe Greece invented western philosophy. Or maybe all claims like that are false. I forget.
ReplyDeleteEither way, the question I'm mulling over now is: why does acquiring a new set of heuristics take so much will power?