Over the past few years I’ve watched my social skills decline from neglect, and I’ve decided that this year I want to start reversing that course. But I want to do it in the context of a larger project that’s been on my mind, a study of the nature and methods of care. That includes topics like listening, hospitality, etiquette, condolence, love languages, Nonviolent Communication, and any other practice that expresses a concern for the well-being of other people. Way too ambitious, like most of my projects, but I at least want to start exploring that territory.
For my first steps down this path, I read a little book with big ideas called On Caring by Milton Mayeroff. I didn’t want to spend months on it at this point, so I just wrote a summary and put it here (here’s the version from the time of this post, if the article has changed a lot by the time you read this). If that looks interesting, maybe you’ll want to pick up the book. It’s only 100 pages, though it’s the kind of book you’ll want to read slowly.
Meanwhile, as usual, other projects have been pushing their way up my priority list, and I will immediately be dropping this project for those. I’ll come back to it later. That’s just how things go with me.
What other projects do you have on the pipeline?
The Mayeroff book seems interesting. There are so many avenues to the subject of care, which vary within age groups and people groups.
The main ones coming up are a Python library for databases, math relearning, and memory improvement. And yeah, this caring project will be kind of an amoeba with all these subtopics oozing out in different directions.