Greetings! How are you today? How do you like to ask that question? One option is “what’s alive in you?”.
The alternatives
I have a couple of people in my life who ask this question: “what’s alive in you?”. Aside from the slight downside of elliciting funny looks, I think it’s a solid alternative to “how are you?” as a conversation opener when you are looking to have a meaningful conversation. Of course, often “how are you?” is not intended to introduce a meaningful undirected conversation; it gets used as a pleasantry too, with the actual direction for the conversation to be provided shortly later (as in the opening line to this snippet).
The abiguity present in “how are you?”
So there’s an ambiguity in receiving the phrase “how are you?” which I think dampens its utility as a question, despite it’s popularity. On the one hand, you can reply to “how are you?” with a simple evaluation (e.g. “good”), for which it is even often socially acceptable to lie if the answer is less than “fine” but you don’t want to get into it. The other common way to reply is to provide a piece of evidence – a thing from your life that relates to how you’re doing, whether that be a thing you did recently or a thing coming up in the future. Each of these replies is fine, with the later opening the conversation up a bit more or giving it a bit more direction.
What “what’s alive in you?” conveys
“What’s alive in you?” differs from “how are you?” in two key regards. It asks something slightly different, and it conveys a different level of interest in the response. “What’s alive in you?” asks what feels most salient, what occupies our thoughts and attention. It’s not about absolute history from the world’s perspective – the things that happened around us, or the events that took place where we were present – though certainly these things will deeply shape our thoughts and attention. And though “how are you?” invites similar responses too, “what’s alive in you?” makes clear that a deeper response is welcome in a way that “how are you?” does not.
The role of memory in “how was your day?” vs “what’s alive in you?”
I’ve been in several situations where the questions “how was your day?” or “how was your weekend?” are greeted with silence while the questionee tries to recall the notable events from their day or weekend. These questions are implicitly requesting some memory seeking. By contrast, “What’s alive in you?” requires no activation of the memory. It does require some amount of introspection, but that introspection is about the present. The goal in taking the question seriously is to identify the things already present in the attention (not literally limited to the present attention; this can certainly include recent attention as well), rather than things we could have been attending to or reflecting on.
The “what have you been thinking about?” alternative
In this regard, I also like the questions “what have you been thinking about lately?"; this doesn’t lean on metaphor as much as “what’s alive in you?” and as a result is understood more quickly and with fewer funny looks than the “what’s alive in you?” query. Responses to “what have you been thinking about lately?” may skew a bit more academic though, whereas “what’s alive in you?” skews more personal.
Maybe my snippets are little bits of what’s alive in me
In some ways, my snippets system is about answering the question “what’s alive in me?” for myself. With this particular snippet, my main goal was simply to get any snippet at all published, since it’s been a few months since I’ve put a snippet out. I want to reactivate the habit of snippet writing. As I’ve seen before, a solid way for me to do this is to publish “deliberate drivel” (or at least content where there is no quality bar to publication) to help make it mentally easier for me to keep sharing thoughts in snippets.
Snippet reactivation brainstorming
Since this is a “reactivation snippet”, I’ll take a moment to brainstorm some of the things I could write about in future posts or snippets.
- Reflections on AI in daily life
- Healthy habits: meditation, yoga, sleep, healthy eating, violin, reading, writing, hosting, HIIT, Tabata, stretch therapy, floating, mental health, NVC
- The NYC AI community (I could do both a less personal reflection on the state and breadth of the community, but separately I’m also interested in exploring what meeting new people means to me at this point in my life)
- Travel plans: Poland and Hawaii
- Unhurried curiosity
- Updates on the automation systems I use throughout my life (after work activities, automatic transaction log, bieber bot, GPT-4 newsletter, go note go, kangaroo autoresponder, etc.)
- The “Say Something Nice” kindness game
- The “Alex’s Lonely World” text adventure game
- An interesting one is “who are the people whose content you see and attend to online?”. It’s easy to lose sight of this and of how much control you have over this. Offline too, I suppose!
- Mini hack sessions, writing club, demo nights, shakshuka brunches
Plan for writing going forward
I’m hopeful that through this lowish effort reactivation snippet, I’ll be more likely to write additional snippets in the coming days and weeks. However, July is a travel-packed and busy month for me, which can make keeping up with habits more difficult. So it’s entirely possible I’ll require a second “reactivation snippet” later rather than getting solidly back into snippet writing in the short term. That said, I do have lots of things listed above that I would enjoy writing about, so there’s a small chance this individual snippet gives me the motivation that I need.
I will of course take a Go Note Go on all of my travels, so I will certainly be writing! I just may be writing privately, rather than these slightly more public pieces like I would prefer.
Plan for greetings going forward
As for asking the “what’s alive in you?” question more often, the funny looks are the main impediment for its use for me. I can mitigate this with a bit of exposition around asking the question. For example, sharing how the question entered my own life alongside asking it can help cut through the quizzical looks a bit and keep the conversation comfortable. So, I suppose my plan is simply to take things one conversation at a time, and use the greetings and questions that feel most appropriate as I go. Feel free to ask these questions of me though!