Who is in your circle of compassion?

This week I was at an in-person event for entrepreneurs, and several of us were commiserating over the fact that since the pandemic, we’ve felt like outsiders in our local area. We had noticed a trend that people were keeping to their inner circles and weren’t too eager to let in new people. As transplants to the area without deep roots, we felt left out.

At a separate event a few weeks ago, a local woman had told me how much she enjoyed keeping to her small group of family and friends during the pandemic.

In times of stress people tend to focus energies on protecting those closest to them, and the early pandemic guidance that we keep to our pods or bubbles encouraged this.

However, for those of us with tiny or nonexistent inner circles, or those who really like mixing and mingling with other circles, this has been isolating.

I worry that in keeping to our own groups, we’re shrinking our circle of compassion, rather than widening it.

This is also one of my issues with platforms like Mastodon. I have this sense that many of the people who appreciate Compassionate Coding have migrated to Mastodon or other tech-forward social networks. I understand why people like those platforms. However, a big part of my message is that we tech people need to interact with and build empathy for people outside of tech. If we isolate ourselves on well-meaning but esoteric techie platforms, we may lose opportunities to do this.

I don’t have perfect answers for any of this, and we all have to strike our own balance. In my own quest to expand my circle of compassion, I have found the following helpful:

• Read and listen to people who disagree with me, perhaps even people whose views “trigger” me. (If I told you some of the books I’ve read during the pandemic, you may unsubscribe from this newsletter, but I promise you, it’s helped me widen my circle of compassion and build bridges.)

• Suspend judgment and attend many in-person events on a variety of topics, some related to tech, some outside of tech. (I ended up at a meetup recently on “Human Design,” which I learned is definitely not the same thing as Human-Centered Design as I had initially guessed. But it was great to hear different perspectives!)

• Stay open to new friendships, and be willing to resize them as needed.

• Talk to people who have been laid off and people who are hiring and try to make introductions.

• Volunteer, both to meet “people of different identities and divergent ideologies” and also, in the case of gleaning, to bolster my sense of abundance, since feelings of scarcity can also cause us to shrink our circle of compassion.

• Include myself in my circle of compassion, through building resilience and watching out for burnout.

Related to burnout, someone shared a version of the graphic below at the entrepreneur meetup, and it hit a little close to home. I’ve previously written about burnout. Perhaps I’ll expand on that in a future newsletter.