Six Billion Duller Men*

Jigsaw

* and women.

Or: Jigsaw Theory 101.

There were two main fears I entertained when starting this blog.  The first fear was that nobody would read it, and the second was that people would read it.  I like to think that every blogger has these fears.  Nobody wants to publish their thoughts and then sit around, with school disco despondency, waiting for comments that never arrive.  On the other hand, nobody wants to click the publish button and find themselves, within the hour, being burned in effigy in Youtube videos.

Any new blog finds itself competing for attention with billions of  other blogs.  It may not survive!  A new blog is created every second.   Swimming in the depths of the blog-ocean (Blocean?) are blogs fated to live and die unseen.  Common sense dictates that if you’re interested in winning web-traffic for your creation, you’ll have to strive to be more that bit more fascinating than untold numbers of people.  Essentially, you will be engaged in a struggle to make billions of people seem duller than you.

Folks like Dale Carnegie, of How to Win Friends and Influence People fame, encouraged us to think that we can and should make ourselves fairly universally likeable.  We can develop attributes that enable us to appeal (more or less) to anyone and everyone.  The cultural influence of Carnegie et al has been pervasive - many of us automatically equate social effectiveness with mastering one-size-fits-all social skills.  We assume that any two people can fit together, like building blocks, as long as they sandpaper down any interpersonal bumps that would otherwise prevent people from smoothly slotting side-by-side.

But what if people aren’t like building blocks?  What if people are like jigsaw pieces?

An individual jigsaw piece usually looks a mess.  There’s a bit of picture on it, but the picture doesn’t quite make sense without other pieces to add context.  It has a funny shape.  Some pieces have distinct bits of picture on them, some are just one colour, some look pretty ugly.  Each piece only fits with a limited number of other pieces – try to force two bits together against their will and you end up damaging both.  Jigsaw pieces are uncooperative and exclusive like that.  (But note that when the whole puzzle is solved, all the pieces will fit together in utopian harmony; but you can only solve the puzzle by first finding out that most pieces don’t fit together.)

If you want to make jigsaw pieces fit together, there are two ways to do it. 

One way is to paint every piece the same colour, trim off all those annoying sticky-out curvy bits, and insist that any piece should be able to fit next to any other piece. That’s the Dale Carnegie way.  Cut away those quirks! 

The other way is to make sure that you navigate each piece towards its proper neighbours, and put them where they belong.  The second way takes a lot longer, of course.

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then perhaps the purpose of blogging is not to reach the widest possible audience.  Maybe it is to display our idiosyncratic messiness, our shape, so that it’s easier for people to navigate towards us or away from us, provided they have internet access.

Perhaps we have onboard navigation systems that try to steer us towards people, situations, pastimes and careers with whom we fit.  Perhaps we’re designed in such a way that if we give up trying to fit where we don’t belong, and give up trying to co-exist with people and situations we can’t stand, we’ll shuffle to the right place eventually.  Maybe we should accept that we’re in the wrong place, believe that there’s a right place, and keep an eye out for road-signs. 

Perhaps there is something intrinsically powerful about refusing to disguise your paintwork and curves, so to speak, whether in conversations or on your CV.  True, some may think you weird.  But maybe the upside of not appearing vaguely attractive to everyone is that you appear irresistibly attractive to the right people.

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then the best way to deal with people you can’t stand is to stay the hell away from them as much as possible, and give up resenting them for driving you mad.  The madness you feel might just be the unseen hand of the jigsaw puzzler, trying to move you somewhere else.  (Perhaps your newfound easy tolerance will irritate your persecutor so much that he or she buggers off.)

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then we should never force ourselves to fit with people we know we don’t fit with.  Instead, we should take our mothers’ advice and be ourselves.  Whatever that means.  (I have no idea.)

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then it follows that nobody’s personality is a complete, self-contained picture, and nobody’s personality is ‘well rounded’.  There are no round jigsaw pieces.  Everyone’s personality is naturally messy and bumpy.  But if we don’t exhibit our native messiness to some extent then how will anyone know that they are supposed to fit next to us?

If people are like jigsaw pieces, what does this mean for our work-lives?  Do our careers mark out our position on the puzzle-board?  If our job feels all wrong, does that mean we’re miles off course?  Camping in the wrong woods?  How should we help our employers or potential employers see what kind of puzzle-piece we are?  Should we mention on our CVs that we enjoy juggling snakes?

How honest should a jigsaw piece be about his or her not-so-nice side?  Should one mention on one’s blog that one enjoys smelling strangers' hair on buses?  How about on one’s resume?  (Personally I think that we should probably regard truly horrid aberrations as grime to clean off ourselves, rather than inwrought aspects of our personal uniqueness.  I could be wrong, though.)

So.  Are we building blocks or jigsaw pieces?

(Next week: what if we aren’t like building blocks or jigsaw pieces, but countries, islands and nation states?)