Understanding other groups
A few months ago, I was thinking that there are many kinds of people that we don’t usually interact with in our individual lives. But one of the best things about this world is the number of different kinds of people and all their differences. So it would be a shame to go through life without trying to expand your boundaries and understanding people who are different from yourself.
For example, I have no real idea what the life of a nurse is like, or the problems an architect deals with.
I asked myself - What’s an easy way try to understand these things?
The solution I thought of was to just join facebook groups for these different kinds of people, and passively absorb the posts on the rare times I go on facebook. I hoped that by occasionally seeing posts, I would get a sense for what their lives are like.
So I tried to join a bunch of different groups, but most had an application to join. The purpose was to not let random spam accounts into the groups. They would ask questions like what kind of nurse are you, or how long have you been working in a hotel, so I made up answers and hoped that would be fine.
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After requesting invites, I ended up getting into a primary school teacher group, a steel industry group, a nurse group, two hotel workers groups, and two architect groups.
Here are the quick results of what I experienced over the past two months:
The school teacher and steel group were useless since no one was actually active in those and only spam was being posted.
The architecture group was okay. People just posted some generic questions occasionally about how to bill a client and such, but I didn’t really get much insight into what being an architect is like. There were some cool building designs posted sometimes though.
The nurse group was good. Definitely a good amount of memes being posted.
But also good discussions as well and people asking for advice on certain things.
I didn’t learn much from the “Crazy Hotel Workers” group. A lot of the posts were just funny stories about guests or complaining about guests. But it was interesting hearing about things that hotel workers like or dislike about things guests do. (they like it when guests bring them food)
The last one I wanted to mention was the truck driver group I joined. I had actually joined this group a while ago though, and it wasn’t with the rest of the groups I joined for this specific experiment.
But this group has been great because people in here often have discussions on the state of the industry and how brokers are charging unfair prices and such. It really gave me a sense for what people care about and how legislation is affecting their lives directly.
I didn’t really have any expectations from this mini experiment when I first started. But now my overall conclusions are that some kinds of professions actively discuss things online, and others don’t as much. For those that do discuss online, it can be somewhat informative to read and listen in. I still miss a lot of context given I don’t work in those industries, but you pick things up.
Professions like nursing in which there are tests to pass and the job itself being complicated resulted in those nurses coming together and discussing more online. This is in contrast to the hotel worker groups in which I guess there aren’t really many questions to ask about how to do a certain thing, since it’s a relatively more straightforward job. Perhaps part of it is also that more people who are nurses or truck drivers plan to do those things for most of their careers and so they’re really invested in it, but it’s not like that for hotel workers?
Overall though, just joining the groups didn’t really give me a sense of what it’s really like to be in that profession. I only got a surface level view from reading FB posts, but I think it’s better than nothing. I’m going to stay in the groups since they’re generally interesting and still provide a view into other worlds.
Other thing to note is that FB groups are probably the best part of FB. They’re some of the only places online that people from across geographies come together to discuss, cheer each other up, guide newcomers, complain, and laugh together. I’m wondering if the communities in FB groups are more tight-knit than those in sub-Reddits.
Considerations of the month
