An openness to what’s uncomfortable.
Looking outside meaning.
Episode 7 of Looking Outside takes us deeper into culture and beyond pre-defined ideas, with Cultural Anthropologist and CEO of MotivBase, an AI Anthropology agency, Ujwal Arkalgud. Today we’re looking outside meaning (whatever that … means?).
Ujwal speaks to core concepts of culture, which is in everything around us, and how all things carry the weight of meaning, even seemingly simple concepts and narratives.
Together Jo and Ujwal explore the philosophical aspects of our lives, including the need to look at counter culture, explore the opposite sides to existing ideas that we think we know inside out, and posit uncomfortable suppositions.
Ujwal also provides a unique perspective on empathy, a current corporate obsession. Posing that perhaps instead of obsessing over feeling empathy, something that’s potentially impossible, we instead focus on acceptance of differences and practice understanding.
Jo’s take.
One of the things that really strikes me, thinking about the people I’ve spoken with for Looking Outside, is that their careers, or their personal life, often take a surprising turn. Sometimes the surprise is in the country they move to, the new culture they are absorbed by. Sometimes it’s a career pivot like moving from banking to marketing, from marketing to behavioral economics, from engineering to anthropology … In most cases this happens as a happenstance, like a chance encounter with a stranger who opened their eyes to something different.
Often when we think about long successful careers, or we consider CEOs and entrepreneurs, we think they have always been this way - tech minded, curious about human beings, idea creators - but perhaps they are just open. Open minded, open to being challenged, open to getting uncomfortable. Open to a world of opportunities beyond the limitations that they can conceive or grew up with. That last one isn’t a stretch, most of us can relate to that, particularly those of us who are hungry for experiences and for that ‘something better’. But the people in question here take it warts and all, they accept that that openness to opportunity also means an openness to the unknown. And the unknown is fraught with nerves, with a test of your confidence, and with big risks that come attached to dire consequences.
We can debate whether this type of mindset is sustainable or even if it’s brave. But it’s undoubtedly very human.
Plato said, “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge.” Practicing an openness towards the uncomfortable and unknown requires you to balance those three sources very carefully and simultaneously (desire should not only appear before the start, knowledge should not only happen at the end, and for god’s sake we need to stop being pulled by emotion in the middle.)
And it’s worth noting, this cannot be done without knowledge.
That’s in part why what Ujwal speaks about is so powerful; both his openness to exploring new and uncomfortable ideas, his reflection on why empathy is impossible, and his own personal and surprising foray into anthropology. He does this not with a conqueror mindset but with a learner mindset. Respecting that he can never truly know, but he must try to learn.
5 ways Ujwal explores the unknown areas of what’s pre-defined.
1 | We are becoming more diverse, more fragmented and this won’t slow.
As society progressed in the 20th century, anthropologists started to realize that there's plenty for us to study within our culture itself because our culture is getting so fragmented and diverse. And then you know the notion of subculture started to get started to develop and get more popularized. Today, in the work we do, everything is a culture. There's absolutely nothing in our society that does not carry meaning. And then the other part that fascinates me is that these meanings are never static.
2 | Empathy is becoming impossible. So understanding is critical.
Just the other day I was Googling books on empathy, and then I discovered that in the last five years every year there's like 20 major titles on empathy. Yet we could argue that the world has become anything but empathetic. I mean, forget the pandemic. Look at every other issue, whether it's social issues, political issues, we are as polarized as we've ever been. It's not just the US, the same thing is happening in Europe. The same thing is happening in in parts of Asia. Look at Brazil. So to me I think one of the biggest things that's under leveraged is this idea that maybe it's not possible to build empathy. And to me, in my personal life this is has been very powerful, especially through the pandemic and especially through the the political turmoil of the last few years. We're losing the ability to have pluralistic dialogue. To be able to disagree without it turning into a screaming match, or without it blowing out of proportion.
3 | To understand better, we must get a little uncomfortable.
I go back to philosophy and I specifically read concepts and ideas that I don't understand or don't even agree with. One such example is there's a whole field of philosophy that believes that we have no free will. Personally, I do not agree with that, but I love reading about it. Because when I read I'm trying to understand why they're making the arguments that they're making, and there's something incredible about that. Lately I find last two or three years, that's been my go-to is to find a way to take myself to places where I wouldn't normally go.
4 | And we must look past the limitations of our base knowledge.
There's a great deal of discourse on this idea that we rely too much on history to tell us about the future and the problem with that is, it only gives us narratives that have happened. It doesn't open our minds to narratives that may have never happened in the past. Or even nuances of those narratives. The more context you layer on, the more nuanced the work becomes.
5 | Being open can lead you down unexpected and meaningful paths.
[Ujwal literally and incidentally met an anthropologist at a bar, and decided to pivot his career.] It's the first taste I got of this idea that there was meaning being expressed in the ways people communicate, in particular, meaning that was implied. After that he handed me a couple of books on philosophy and then got into anthropology because of that. But it was completely happy circumstance. By the time I finished my engineering degree, I knew. It's one of those things that I always think back to. I don't know if it was meant to be or it was just, you know, pure luck. But nonetheless here I am.
About Ujwal.
Ujwal Arkalgud is an award-winning cultural anthropologist and a pioneer in the field of digital ethnography and the study of implicit and symbolic meaning using the internet. He co-founded MotivBase in 2015, which is the world's first technology that leverages deep anthropological models to enable the study of meaning with Machine Learning and Big Data.
Ujwal serves on the board of the Center for Food Integrity in the United States.
Connect with Ujwal on Linkedin.
Sign up to his newsletter, Why Meaning Matters.
Check out Ujwal & the MotivBase team's podcast, Why Meaning Matters.
