| ▲ | mapontosevenths 8 hours ago |
| > Biggest lesson learned: I could not do it without at least one other person (or more) who I trust almost 100% with all of myself. Its strange. The biggest lesson I learned was almost the opposite: I learned that the meaning of life has nothing to do with other people or their estimation of me. It has more to do with who you are when there is nobody else around. Other people often act as a sort of fun house mirror that distort and reflect back a false image. Learning to be happy alone and seeing through the pleasant lies is absolutely vital to becoming an adult. |
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| ▲ | in_cahoots 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| On the contrary, developing a deep relationship with someone very different than myself (different religions, native languages and countries, socioeconomic class, race, gender) has shown me the lies I've been telling myself all my life. It's easy to identity lies and hypocrisy in others. But the brain has all sorts of tricks to prevent it from looking inwards; at least for me it prefers feeling rewarded to deep self-criticism. Finding someone who sees me and will happily call me on my assumptions, conditioning, and BS has been a great gift. |
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| ▲ | saltcured 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not sure I'd have phrased it as "lies I've been telling myself", but I have a similar experience from a cross-cultural relationship, from mid 20s to early 50s. We had to work through conflicts more explicitly, with a lot more communication. Many things may be misunderstanding due to divergent assumptions, expectations, and even different body language signals. I guess the "lie" exposed here is the way people can automatically believe they're seeing the truth of a social situation. It is easy to project false experience and motivation onto others. A more truthful approach recognizes windows of uncertainty around many encounters. I think this applies to basic single-culture contexts too. Even in the same culture or the same family, we don't really know exactly what another person is experiencing. Many seem cocksure that their social read is correct, and any grief is the other party's deliberate action. It takes a certain detachment to realize that your misreading of a situation may well be the genesis of a negative spiral, rather than a justified response... | | |
| ▲ | in_cahoots 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The social aspect is a part of it, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. So much of how we fundamentally see the world- the role of the individual vs society, luck vs skill vs determination as being important for success, what defines a 'happy' life- is determined by our own conditioning. By seeing someone else's perspective you start to appreciate that there aren't many 'first principles' in life. Take a simple example, marriage. If you're a Millennial you were probably brought up to think marriage is for love, and should produce kids. Depending on your orientation and enculturation, the wife is 'supposed' to stay at home or 'supposed' to have a career. We don't question the basic outlines of what a marriage looks like, unless you happen to be a part of the polyamory or fundamental religious communities, in which case you probably take those standards as being the ideal. My husband's entire family had arranged marriages. Seeing their relationships gave me a new perspective on what a marriage can be, and forced us to be intentional about what parts of our culture we bring along. It's not that we're doing marriage 'better' than anyone else, but when you can't assume anything about what a marriage looks like you have to really examine it in detail. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | From an evolutionary standpoint what would be the benefit of the brain looking inwards and constantly questioning itself? Certainly lower animals mostly just go with what instinct tells them, maybe with memory of prior experience in the larger-brained ones. Most people also seem to operate on their feeling of "common sense" without much reflection, at least in my observation. | | |
| ▲ | dwattttt 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > what would be the benefit of the brain looking inwards and constantly questioning itself? When what you think matters. An animal that questions its belief "there is no tiger behind that bush" and finds a tiger lives longer than one that doesn't. |
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| ▲ | slfnflctd 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I feel like we need both. There are mental/emotional experiences I have on the regular which there is no point in trying to communicate to someone else but still bring me great benefit. We need to value our alone time, absolutely. We also ultimately derive pretty much everything we most value in life from our interactions with other lives, which is why I think it's so important to develop high-trust relationships with at least one or two other people so we can continue to grapple with the fact that we all have different perspectives, weaknesses and strengths and can usually learn more and get significantly more things done when we cooperate than when we're running solo. Which requires trust. YMMV, of course. Some people can go build a cabin in the woods and live off the land and spend all their free time meditating and be perfectly happy. But that's not most of us. And even those people eventually get too old to keep taking care of themselves. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > We also ultimately derive pretty much everything we most value in life from our interactions with other lives This implies that almost everything you value is something transient that can, and one day will, be taken away. If not willingly, then by death. Doesn't it make more sense to have a few core values that don't depend on others and then build relationships and all the rest upon that foundation? To steal from Alan Watts, lets use an example. Imagine a whirlpool in a clear stream. It has great beauty and takes intricate forms as it dances a whirls. You sit beside it and enjoy watching it for hours. Now ask yourself is it the particular group a H2O molecules that make up the whirlpool that you love? If so it will be gone in an instant, and each moment for you will become another in a series of great losses as the molecules are swept away by new ones. Is it the pattern the water makes that you love? No, the pattern itself changes every moment as well. The change itself is part of what mesmerizes you. What you love about the whirlpool is something deeper, and more fundamental, something that change can't take from you. That's the thing you have to build your appreciation of life from. Other people are just the molecules and ripples. > Some people can go build a cabin in the woods and live off the land and spend all their free time meditating and be perfectly happy. I would argue that a man who can't stand to be alone with himself is either a bad man who is a good judge of character, or an incomplete person. I don't mean that everyone should go live alone, just that everyone should be able to. You're probably right that most people can't do it, but the majority is often wrong. | | |
| ▲ | array_key_first 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It depends on how you view life. In my view, the purpose of life is to build relationships, love, and understanding. I can be alone, but loneliness forever is, in my mind, indistinguishable from me not existing. Tree and the forest and all that. Yes, relationships die because everything changes constantly. Nothing is stagnant. But then again everything dies. Ultimately, I want to impact others and be impacted. | | |
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| ▲ | elliotec 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is an interesting perspective but I think both are necessary. At different times in my life (perhaps correlated to the "brain eras," though I'm still a bit skeptical of the details here) I've needed others for development and contentment, and at other times, I've needed to focus on self-love and solo happiness as you describe. Whatever your "meaning of life" may be, it's not the estimation of you that other people have that is important, but we are incredibly social creatures. Life is really not possible for individuals of our species without some level of society and community. Even Christopher Knight - the North Pond Hermit in Main who lived alone without human contact for 27 years - survived by burglarizing cabins and camps and was eventually reintegrated into society. I guess my point is this is a dialectic. Both can be true, and both are true. The "trust almost 100% with all of myself" might be debatable, but "I could not do it with at least one other person" seems kind of obvious, as does "Learning to be happy alone is vital to becoming an adult." |
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| ▲ | thisislife2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Both of you are right - OP is right that life does become weary when you have to do everything yourself, with no help or support from others - and that includes emotional support. We are social creatures, after all. You are right that we as adults also need to learn to be comfortable / content with our thoughts when we are alone with them, and not define our happiness through our relations. We all need both solitude and company, to introspect and grow. |
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| ▲ | array_key_first 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The danger with self reinforcement is you can convince yourself of almost anything. There are many selves, and you will never know your true self. Because you can only process yourself through your own mind, which will perform transforms, regardless of how hard you try not to. And maybe there isn't even a true self, only perceptions. |
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| ▲ | kulahan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We're a social species. It's not a funhouse mirror, it's just another side of your personality. No human can even survive in isolation, so the solitary side of you is an exceptionally small part of who you are. |
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| ▲ | lawlessone 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >I learned that the meaning of life has nothing to do with other people or their estimation of me. i think of this as the 'no longer caring if my socks match' era. why: You can't see them, my jeans cover my ankles why are you looking at my socks? both socks have the same texture that's all that matters who has time to sort socks? |
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| ▲ | c22 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I buy my socks in "generations", alternating white and black. I ruthlessly purge individuals when they develop holes and I purge the entire n-2 generation whenever I buy a new batch. | | |
| ▲ | kulahan 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've been buying socks from Sketchers for years now. It's the only brand I buy. They're not amazing, but I get holes in my socks so fast I don't really care. At the very least, all my socks match, even though I probably have some that are 8 years old and some that are 2 weeks old. |
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > who has time to sort socks It takes a minute Who doesn't have time? Trying to hyper optimize your time so aggressively that you can't bother with tiny chores is crazy |
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