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Originally Posted by Anne2.0
Thank you for many very interesting and thoughtful ideas about anxiety and groups. I especially benefited from hearing your thoughts about your own participation in groups. Work related groups have never been an issue for me, even though most of my work now is solitary or intensive work with a client. I spend a lot of time writing. I find it easy to work with other people, with rare exceptions over the years when I had an actual job and actual colleagues (as opposed to the independent consulting I do now). I would be starving if I could not work effectively with many different kinds of people, as I rarely am hired by the same group.
I'd like to figure out how to do what you do, bring people together, but that is clearly not my something I do well. I think my main issue in community based groups ATM (hasn't always been this way, mostly in the past years) is I don't feel I get much out of the group or I just don't enjoy my participation or think it's worth leaving the peacefulness of my home and interacting with others. In the case of one creative group I've been a part of for more than 5 years, it may be that I've outgrown the learning and other offerings of the group. Another group I tried just last week was a new group but with people who have similar interests as one of the best groups I was involved with half a dozen years ago. It bored me to tears. And while I think it's possible that the boredom I experience in groups recently is because they are in fact boring, I sense that is not it. I think I am lacking, or have lost, some intangible ability to engage with others in the ways that I used to. It's definitely not based on the behavior of others or how anyone treats me. But outside of group activity, I am never bored, never have been, have always found many different activities/ideas/etc interesting. So that's what I'm trying to figure out.
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And how do you feel now about being completely self-employed and consulting? That is exactly what I fancy and have also been developing in the past couple years for myself. Right now in addition to my academic job and I am constantly on the fence whether or not it would be a good a for me to completely give up the job and mainstream academia. Just wrote about these dilemmas today on my thread about motivation. I also spent a great deal of my time writing
I also completely relate to your second paragraph about not finding groups interesting enough to sustain participation. I definitely experience similar even in my work groups or those other social groups that are based on my interests. For the work ones, I just endure it for the sake of what is indeed interesting and out of responsibility. I rarely participate very regularly in the personal ones though and that's something I've decided not to worry about and push, what would be the point, I also would not be good to anyone else that way.
On the dynamic of not having the same level of interest and ability to participate in groups as in the past, I can quite easily imagine even just reading your posts here that it may not be trivial for you to find even individuals, let alone groups, that can satisfy your mind and perhaps desire for quality. It is hard to sustain interest in that sense, I know it very well. I also socialize very differently now than when I was younger and sometimes do wonder that I lost that sense and ability, and I actually think I did lose the breadth of it. But I do find that in groups that have a few individuals I find interesting, stimulating and mature enough, it can be enough motivation to stay and even interact with the entire group. Sometimes a natural but unspoken alliance and appreciation develops with the few people that I like and that attracts and recruits more - this is basically how I built up my current work team as well. I try to pay attention not to surround myself with introverts (like myself) only because that would not be enough to cement a group. It does have to be out in the open and exposed enough for the appropriate people to find it though, which is not always easy for personal social groups. I have used meetup.com to initiate some, sometimes it works other times it does not, and the groups have never remained very long (like many years) but I personally don't have a desire to remain in the same group and interact with the same people beyond 1-2 years either and it is because I often feel I outgrow them and want to evolve in different ways, however arrogant that may sound. I keep touch with a few individuals long-term but not with groups, I even mix up my work collaborators and luckily my immediate team members are mostly trainees who move on after a few years or people similar to me that team up for certain projects but not permanently. You see, it is part of my dilemma whether I want to give up the job - the team dynamic would definitely go with that.