On How to Ruin Relationship Effectively
A deep reflection on social interaction from an unconscious perspective.
I often got irritated by people.
Every time I put myself into a certain group of people or environment, I’ll be happy for a moment before leaving with guilt and an obscure feeling of dissatisfaction. It took some space and alone time for me to gain some clarity on how I see the world and approached people.
In this alone time, I spent much time sitting quietly on my chair while watching the subtle movement of clouds, think deeply and reflect on alienation as a phenomenon and everyday interaction. I am only one of those many people who got alienated, either to themselves or the environment.
When you are used to seeing things in the darkness, sometimes you can see it in people’s faces — things they hide and suppress, the longing, the unhappiness, the hunger. It's on their faces, people cover it with a thick mask that they wear every day and pretend they living a great life. I knew it because I’ve done that for years, so do people that come to talk to me.
Ask your friend what they value or want in their life, and they will look at your face astonishingly. We carry our ignorance on our shoulders every day, we meet and interact with various people, yet we know nothing and felt so unconnected with them in a deeper sense. It sickening, to know there's an ocean in between, and we don't even know how to swim.
I ponder with this topic for years, and though I’ve been exposed myself to quite eccentric and different kind of experiences, I’ve always attracted the same kind of people no matter where or when.
The first kind of people who were sucked into my orbit were those who have mental problems and difficulties in their life or people who have similar ideas about life. They lose energy and faculty to get out of themselves. No one to talk to, not even enough financial power to get them to the psychiatrist or psychologist. They found guilt and shame in talking about these topics with their family or friend. I open my door, not as a self-diagnosed philosopher or physician, but merely as a fellow survivor who is lucky enough to find a light at the end of the tunnel.
The other ones are those who got close to me emotionally. Interestingly, these people different in nature from me. I can enjoy myself in solitude; I could go hike alone in the mountains or spend time by myself, while these people can’t stand silence or spend a minute without talking or doing something. This dynamic is quite odds.
I jumped myself into different water and pools; abstractly or concretely, in ideal sense or practical sense. To some extent, this relent stubbornness would only be scraped by doing things directly alone by myself. I’ll get into the pool, feel the water with the lips, taste it with my tongue, only to spit out annoyedly with so much dissatisfaction.
This unhealthy pattern kept coming back over and over. It made me think about all these years have been spending with people, what went wrong.
If it’s not the other people, is it me?
In banal and everyday life, we tend to think our actions and direction are shaped by the most rational motif and the logical reason we find. We hang out with certain people, we join into a group or club of interest because we think it's the best option to fulfill our interest and provide us with things we need or want in life. We feel so much in power on deciding which ones to interact with, where or when the time is spent.
Perhaps that is not always the case. How many people do we know to live their lives to maximum rationality, like a Buddhist? How many of our friends live like a stoic sage?
For most people, our seemingly rational behavior and action were driven or influenced by irrationality or the unconscious motifs. The sad truth, we never really know, or bothered willing to know, the what and the why things are.
Homo Economicus or human as an economical creatures, stated that in the process of fulfilling the needs, human will base his action and decision on rational motifs. On a wider scale, the economy could be understood as everything related to the process to produce and distribute resources to the people or society. Aside from natural resources, human is also a resource who produces values.
The concept of value may vary on a different level and aspect, but the value here is simply referred to as everything that is perceived as valuable, worth, or important to someone or a society. Values are the symbol or a measurement of the resources we produce, either by human or nature.
Let’s put it in context. We spend the amount of time and energy working on the farm, or in the office, and produce certain output or resources. It might be crops or scientific research or music or writing or anything. For the amount of time and energy we spent, we exchange it and extract certain resources. Later, these resources would be valued by people or society. And it could be traded with money as a symbol of exchange value.
It felt dry to view and limit economical process as mechanistic process and merely about the material transaction. If we broaden the meaning of economic process as an interaction or transaction of these immaterial values on a daily basis within society, and the conception of welfare and prosperity are dug deeper beyond the physical aspect of human needs, but also psyche needs, then perhaps we could put the social interaction as a metaphor of the economic process of supply and demand.
If it lacks scientific accountability, well, let's just say that art always uses a metaphor to describe a phenomenon. Or for the sake of simplifying the complexity of everyday interaction, it is a very beautiful and practical analogy to be used as a point of view.
Values are spread within society, conventionally and personally. A society might cherish certain traits or character and unconsciously agree on them as something valuable and important. People seek these values, it’s wanted by an individual to set the direction of their life or to develop oneself. For instance, the ability to communicate in a team, or speak in front of a crowd, the social skill, the humor, the leadership skill, those are traits that conventionally and unconsciously cherished and many people want those values in their life.
The other set of values are the personal and basic needs of the human inner self or the psyche. Certain values might not be as attractive to others, while for another it might be very important. But also, these values are needed as basic to building fulfilling life and human relations. These values could be the foundation of the identity or personality. One might values creativity and freedom more, while the other values discipline and strength.
This reflects the two motifs or principal of psyche — need and want — which drives humans to fulfill their interest in social interaction, while on the process of doing it these two principal would coexist dan intersect to develop and form human personality.
From the cultural and humanist perspective, values are more intrinsic. It beyond the physical or material aspect. We value things because it has an essence on it. Every form or the essence of human expression could be seen as something valuable and worth. These value could be manifested or transformed into certain things which could be perceived directly through senses. We call it art. But on daily basis, the values become abstract and unformed, but still, they could be felt and perceived directly in someone’s personality. We might value someone because of certain traits, while we despise others because of lack of it.
If we assume that social interaction on daily basis is a process to fulfill one’s interest of inner values or psyche — the needed and the wanted ones, then the process of interaction could be understood as an unconscious mechanism of supply and demand. The group of people or the environment are merely the markets for the transaction, a place to exchange values.
Do we really think, we are in control of our life? While we sleepwalking and drives by the unconscious motifs to fulfill our lack of certain values or aspect in our life? or assume the people we hang out with, the environment, the ideas that we believed, are the rational decision we make? While we need things that missing in our life, and we want things that birth hope and dreams? And we know nothing about ourselves or others and keep living unconsciously because we never bother to ask.
We probably identified ourselves with those who value freedom or like to break the rule, because we were repressed and raised in an undemocratic family. Or we might socialize with a certain environment or group of people because it provides us with fraternity and warmth which is lacking in our life. We perhaps seek a partner who can listen and understand, because we can not understand our own selves. We want to become rich, or educated, or famous because that is the most normal thing to do in society and everyone wants it. Nobody cares about the why.
We seek values on others to compensate for the lack of certain aspect in our life or within our psyche, and we offer our innermost value to those who needed and wanted it, unconsciously. In a material and rational context, the economic transaction gives satisfaction if both parties gain profit or advantages; while on everyday interaction, pleasure and satisfaction are reached through understanding and fulfill each other's interests or needs of values.
The ideal way of human interaction is when the needs of the psyche are fulfilled through understanding and connection. That certainly not the case in everyday life. We blur the concept of “what we needed” and “what we wanted”. We mix it up and assume it is the same thing, and applied it on daily basis. These vague concepts put relations to an end, unhealthy contradiction, weary relation, unreplied text or unanswered calls, a-not-welcomed-laugh, and the lack of appreciation of human.
There is no same water for every pool. Different places, different people. As humans, we need to learn again how to interacting with other people. We need to clarify our concept; when to interact with others because we need them as a human being, and when to interact to certain people because we want to learn from them to develop ourself. We often mix and combine these two motifs unapologetically and unconsciously; that is very careless and egotistical behavior. I just realized this.
We sell things or we look for things in an unsuitable market. We sell gold in a fish market, where people come only to buy fish. And we seek food in the market that only sell electronics. Then we get mad at people because we feel underappreciated as human beings, and we blame others because they are not providing us with things we look for. We lose hope in people because of our inability to find the right market to sell ourselves. We perhaps have come to the wrong places, but we never look at ourselves and realized that it's on us.
We probably have asked too many things, and never really see things the way they are. We demand things we want from people that only offer what we needed; we demand everything we need from those who only provide us with what we wanted. It might have been mistaken.
We might have been wrong for asking a clown to reveal the secret of the universe, or the meaning of life and love, while it only offers laughter and joy.
We might be sinful for asking a son to be a hero or knight, while his true nature is a healer or maybe a lover.
We need to stop asking a philosopher or a poet, to cheers the crowd, if they only offer wisdom and freedom.
And then perhaps, we should stop asking our lover to a point, that she or he simultaneously has to be a mother or a father, a best friend, a brother or a sister, and at the same time become the object to fulfill our sexual fantasies, while she/he might only offer a platonic love.
