Nobody’s crazy… and alone

TLDR: Today, I’m launching a new initiative: anonymous community surveys. The first one is about how we experience rejection in Tango. If you’ve ever felt confused, hurt, or unsure about being refused a dance, this is your chance to share your perspective. Click here to take part!

The psychology of money

A few months ago, I finished reading the book “The Psychology of Money”. In one of the chapters titled “Nobody’s crazy”, the author explains how our decisions about money are bound to our experiences in life so far. If, for example, you tell a person who lived through a booming phase in the market not to invest their money in the stock market, they will think you are crazy. The same goes the other way around. If you tell a person who lived through a period of big financial crisis and lost a lot of money on a stock market bubble like the one in the 90s in Greece, that investing can get them some long-term rewards, they will think you for a scammer.

Our experiences are the lenses we constantly wear without even realising it, and they are able to shape our opinions and world view in ways that we can’t even imagine. Having written more than 200 posts and discussed multiple times with hundreds of people about any kind of issue I wrote, I came to realise how different and unique our paths are. However, I also came to realise how many of those different paths often lead to the same or similar destinations. We are all unique, but we share so much in common.

We are not all the same…

Having also gotten a lot of comments that resonated with many of my posts, I could have easily fallen into the trap of thinking that this is the right opinion about whatever subject I wrote, and any other one is totally wrong. But when you discuss with curiosity to understand why and how someone’s opinion is formed, you realise that not everyone is like you. Also, in many cases, the different opinion makes sense if you had the same kind of path and experiences!

However, it is a very common fallacy when we meet people that we share something in common (like our love for Tango) to believe that we share common opinions on other subjects too and vice versa. It is interesting how our minds try to categorise other people into “us” and “them” groups. The problem is that not everyone thinks as we do, and not everyone should. But we always need to approach each other with curiosity to find out our common grounds and our differences.

Anyway. I wrote multiple posts about all this, and no matter how much I write, our minds still continue to work this way. We are still going to place people in groups, think that everyone agrees with us without asking explicitly, etc. But I realise that as a global community, we lack some data.

I mean, we often express opinions and think they are true because this is how our experience informs us, but how often have you seen data… hard data… numbers… about all those statements? We say, for example, “Tango communities are snobbish”, but there is no statistical analysis that can prove if such a statement is true or not and to what extent. Having the background of a researcher, I often wonder about all this.  How can we support such statements without evidence based on just empirical, often biased data?

The invisible, anonymous opinions.

Moreover, many times such opinions expressed come from people who have a lot of experience, like teachers, DJS and generally prominent community members, because their experience and status informs and protects them. It is easy to express an opinion as a long-time dancer, teacher, or organiser because you can always say “I have X years of experience to support it.” and this gives you an air of credibility. But what if this person still has their own biases that influence their opinion? Certainly, experience offers valuable insight, but it’s not immune to bias. That’s why hearing from a wider range of voices matters too.

And what happens to all those other members in the community? Are they not allowed to express an opinion? Obviously, we all have a voice and we should use it. But oftentimes, people are discouraged by impostor syndrome and think it is not their job to express an opinion. Especially beginners and newcomers in the community often feel this “Who am I to say something?” feeling. I know because I felt it too. I felt it multiple times in many of the posts I wrote so far.

Add to this that I am signing with my name every post… and you can probably understand how this makes me feel even more vulnerable. I think the Internet has a solution to that. Anonymity. Yes. Create an anonymous or a fake account, and then you are free to say whatever you really feel. But then… your credibility is gone. Many will think… “Why are they afraid to show their real identity?”. And here comes another solution. Big numbers. Yes. When your voice matches hundreds and thousands of others, then you are not alone. As much as people will try to discredit, invalidate or dismiss your opinion if it is just expressed as an individual, the same cannot happen when your opinion is matched with many others. As much as the years of experience of a prominent dancer can give them some credibility, your large group of people expressing the same opinion as yours makes your opinion and view also a reality that needs to be expressed.

The idea

Thinking of all this, I realised that I can provide a solution. This blog is a very flexible platform which I can use in many different ways, and creating and running surveys is one of them. My background in research and the required statistical analysis and related skills can be put to good use. So here it comes. I decided to conduct different surveys focused on specific topics that we often discuss, but also many of us out there often hesitate to express an opinion. The surveys will all be anonymous and most of the time quick.

I will gather the data. Analyse them and then present them in blog posts and videos on my YouTube channel.

My goal is not to find the right answers. My goal is simply to raise a mirror to our community and enable all of us to see the whole of it. To see the different opinions, the different views, the potential cultural or demographic influences, etc. Hopefully, this will be a good starting point to finally have some hard evidence based on large numbers on many different subjects that we face as communities.

The first such subject is a touchy one. It is about rejections and how we deal with them.

You can fill in the survey here… and share it with your friends to spread the news and support this new endeavour.

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango is about Malena. She is a woman who sings with sorrow, expressing pain that can’t be easily named. She is a voice that carries many silent voices. What I hope to achieve with these questionnaires is to carry your own voices and show us the reality of our community. A reality we might already know or one that might surprise us.

Fill in the questionnaire and let’s see what comes out of it.

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