Showing Face

Sacrifice, networking, showing up

A couple of times recently I’ve heard this new phrase, “show face,” meaning to show up somewhere to sort of check a box or to remind people you exist. (In one instance it was professional, and in another, social.)

I think this is a pretty new term, anyway; honestly, I have no recollection what we would have called this in the past (isn’t that a funny thing, when a new term enters common use and nobody recalls the old one?)

In fact, the only place I can even find it online is the Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced compendium of slang. They define it this way: “to make an appearance, maybe to an event, party, club, get-together etc, that you don’t want to be your final destination.”

Terms catch on because they distill something, and that phrase, “show face,” distills something: it matters to show up. You don’t have to really want to be there, you don’t have to feel your best, you just have to show up. It’s easy to intellectualize your way out of it: Oh, they know I’m working, I don’t need to put my butt in the seat, oh, she knows we’re friends, she’ll understand if I skip the party. But it just doesn’t work like that.

This reminds me of something I saw on Twitter. Usually I despise these random stories with some trite little moral, or these pompous people who derive laws of the universe from something their neighbor said the other day. (If you spend a lot of time on social media, you know the posts I’m talking about.)

But this was some guy thinking about the question of whether or not to do something like take a 30-minute drive to go pick up a friend out of the airport when they’re visiting for a long weekend. In the comments, a lot of people basically said, he can get to the city on his own, you can pay for his cab. But one guy said, no, a real friend will pick you up at the airport.

If you only want the frictionless time spent together at a bar or going out or whatever, but you don’t want to actually pick the guy up, then you’re not really his friend. You just view his time as an amenity or as a kind of leisure. You like hanging out with him in the sense that you like picking up a video game. But you’re not invested in the person. That’s sort of how I understand “showing face.”

This is sort of adjacent to a point I make when I write about tech. I did that recently, but in an older piece I think my headline really captured it: “Keep the doing in doing things.” There’s no shortcut. There’s no result without process. There’s no destination without journey. I think digital technology creates the illusion that there is—that the work can be excised, shortcutted, conjured away—but you always have to get to your result.

I don’t think you can reduce this to the cynical idea of “networking”—show up so people know who you and will do you favors in the future! Nor can you reduce it to the cynical idea of “emotional intelligence”—almost like a bloodless description of friendship by someone who doesn’t know what it is.