Why it's more fun in person

LOL

Well, yes. Sometimes something on facebook or youtube has actually made me laugh (really, laugh means out loud - it's not a laugh if you keep it in your head). But . . .

There are times when I have been with friends or my family and I have really laughed OUT LOUD. I've laughed so hard it was hard to catch my breath and my stomach actually started to hurt. I've laughed so hard that I was having too much fun to stop.

Has that ever really happened to you on social media?  Has it even happened on the phone, that uncontrolled, slightly crazy, fully engaged laughter?

Nothing kills a good time like trying to explain humour so we won't go there.  We will go there to say that it's probably not possible for a human being to be fully engaged with a machine.  There are just so many parts of our brain that only get busy when they are in the presence of another real live human being.  We're just learning how they all work and, most importantly, how they all work together. But it seems clear that somehow we know the difference between a person we are actually seeing in the room with us and a person that we are reading about or watching on a screen.  And knowing that difference means that the quality of our connection is different when the other person is an idea on the other side of a social media connection.

We've all tried to explain one of those times when we laughed so hard we challenged certain muscles in our lower abdomen.  Usually after the other person smiles vaguely or gets impatient, we interrupt our own laughter (even memories of laughing are funny) and say "I guess you just had to be there."

So. . . the next time you see me writing about an event at NLP Canada Training and wishing you could be there, think about it for a moment.  I really do wish you would be there.  Because it's just not as much fun connecting over the net.  It's a great alternative to not connecting at all but,

It's way more fun to connect in person.

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