(2020-03-04) Embracing The Discomfort Of Self-reflection With Buster Benson

Embracing the discomfort of self-reflection with Buster Benson. Welcome to the first edition of Mindful Makers, an interview series where we ask highly creative people how they manage to do great things while taking care of their mental health. The first guest is Buster Benson.

I was an early blogger on Diaryland and Livejournal and even built a few of my own blogging tools.

We all witnessed blogs and online publishing take off as they found a business model friend in online advertising. As that was happening, I also saw private journaling receding from the zeitgeist. And yet, private journaling has always been how I figure things out in my own head (sense-making), so that the business-y and status-y milestones can be handled with integrity when reached.

750 Words was an experiment at the end of a long line of experiments that I had for trying to bring Morning Pages into the internet age. I’m sure you’re familiar with this, but for those who might not know, Morning Pages is a habit popularized by Julia Cameron and her fantastic book, “The Artist’s Way”, and encourages unfiltered daily writing as a way to clear your brain of cobwebs and stuck thoughts.

I love what Dr. James Fox (creator of the Choose One Word program, which I highly recommend) says about journaling’s unexpected benefit of giving you a chance to get extremely bored of your own internal narrative. Only by hearing it out in excruciatingly verbose detail can we then say, “I get it. Can we move on now?”

Because I bought into this underdog ideology that sharing our lives online was the future. I think I still believe that, but have a long list of caveats and warnings and hard lessons learned in the footnotes.

Why Are We Yelling? is a 250-page book with 100+ illustrations and eight “things to try” when it comes to the art of productive disagreement.

I wrote the book because it was the question I felt the most blocked by. I’ve always identified myself as a “civil” disagreer, pretty level-headed, pretty open-minded, etc. Rational, etc. But as the years went by, and as the 2016 political upheaval (CultureWar) became more obviously central to our public lives, I realized that what I was doing wasn’t working. It wasn’t working to move conversations forward (it was just expertly avoiding them) and it wasn’t leading to stronger relationships, smarter thinking, or a less anxious life.

TLDR—we’re yelling because we only have a few tools in our toolbox for resolving disagreements: using the voice of power to shut conversations down, or using the voice of reason to appeal to a higher truth... what else is possible?