You're viewing all posts tagged with relationships
“
Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.
David Sosa, The Spoils of Happiness

(Source: The New York Times)

“
Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Why the pedophile is a victim too

I want you to carefully consider the following passage from How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer:

And then there’s the case of the married, middle-aged Virginia schoolteacher who suddenly started downloading child pornography and seducing young girls. His behavior was so brazen that he was quickly arrested and convicted of child molestation; he was sent to a treatment program for pedophiles, but he was expelled from the program after propositioning several women there. Having failed rehab, he was to appear in court for sentencing, but the day before his court date, he went to the emergency room complaining of blinding headaches and a constant urge to rape his neighbor. After ordering an MRI, the doctors saw the source of the problem: he had a massive tumor lodged in his frontal cortex. After the tumor was removed, the deviant sexual urges immediately disappeared. The man was no longer a hypersexual monster. Unfortunately, the reprieve was brief; the tumor started to grow back within a year. His frontal cortex was once again incapacitated, and the urges of pedophilia returned.

This is an example of a man, who of his own free will, made terrible moral decisions.

Except he fell victim to cancer. The man fell victim to an altered brain chemistry beset by a tumor that radically altered his moral paradigm. From married man and educator, to brazen sex monster. He didn’t choose cancer. It’s unlikely the doctors that diagnosed him were able to determine the cause of the cancer. It could have been environmental. It could have been genetic. It could have been a genetic predisposition that was triggered by environmental factors. Every day that you and I lead a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ life is a blessing. There is so much we don’t understand about the complexity of this world and the relationships between all living things, that each day we pass in relative comfort and happiness is absolutely a miracle. One day can change everything. The man in the passage above went from being a “married, middle-aged Virginia schoolteacher” to being a “pedophile”—one of the most degenerate terms a person can be referred to as, alongside ‘rapist’, ‘murderer’, and ‘thief’. But do you see the essential problem here? That man wasn’t making moral decisions according to his own free will. For me, this passage is an exemplary example of why we cannot trust in traditional social constructions of morality and justice, and provides an excellent reference of awareness from which we can begin re-evaluating how we, as a society, understand and struggle to deal with societal dysfunction.

***

In 2010, when I was finishing up grad school, my aunt and uncle visited during graduation weekend and hung out at my apartment for awhile as we caught up with each others’ lives. One thing I’ve always enjoyed about my uncle is his willingness to engage in debates, and inevitably we got into a debate that night about morality and free will.

My position was that we do not have the freedom to do whatever we like, but that we are only free to act within a range of behaviors that are determined by the immediate context, the normative environment in which we grew up, and our genetics. His position was that people do have free will and should be held accountable for their actions, and that people like pedophiles and murderers are “evil”. I pushed on him that in all cases people who commit such horrid crimes have been the a victim or witness to a similar circumstance, and that act of witness, combined with the context in which they perpetrated their own crime, the environment in which they grew up, and their genetics, all coalesced in that moment in time in providing them with a limited ranged of options to choose from and ultimately forcing them to act criminally. We as individuals exist presently as the culmination of everything that has ever happened before in the entirety of the universe. Philosophically, I’m a hard determinist, which to me, means that I believe the universe is infinitely dense and that it is impossible for an absolute vacuum to exist, because a physical ‘something’ cannot interact with an unphysical ‘nothing’. What this means is that we live in a universe that is subject to the ‘butterfly effect’, in which each and every action through the course of history has a profound effect on the smallest and most mundane decisions made by each of us in our daily lives. This notion of hard determinism is what makes it difficult for me to believe in ‘free will’ as it’s been traditionally conceived, and thus hold people accountable for their ‘moral’ actions.

I’ve been sitting on this idea for quite awhile. I’ve been thinking about it recently primarily in terms of homeless, a rather pervasive problem in San Francisco (where I currently live) that I am confronted with on a daily basis. Many people have no problem asserting that a homeless person has ended up that way due to a series of poor decisions. But if you look closer, that person had few choices and the odds were stacked against them. Usually, a homeless person is born into a family that already has a history of mental or physical illness, financial disorder, and instability in the home. They are born into a family that practically sets them up for failure. Besides inheriting genes that might predispose them to alcoholism or drug addiction, they’re raised in an environment in which that behavior is modeled for them as a norm; these people who, of their own ‘free will’, make bad decisions, are really doing their damnedest to struggle through life making the best decisions possible given their range of opportunities at any given moment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked or biked past the late-middled-aged black man who sits on the sidewalk leaned up against Osha Thai at the corner of Geary & Leavenworth, who wears a gray beard, stocking cap, hoodie, and always has his arms wrapped around his knees, which are pulled up to his chest. I pass because he’s begging. I pass because other people pass. I pass because people don’t think he deserves money. They don’t think he’ll use it wisely. They don’t trust him. They don’t want to get to know him because they know he’s a person who has made a series of really bad decisions over the course of his life, and he deserves to be begging on that corner.

But he deserves to be on that corner no more than I deserve to be in my warm bed at night, with a paycheck, made out by an accounting office at a tech startup that I work at, being regularly electronically deposited into my bank account. Because we are both just acting the only way we know how, given the circumstances before us. Which is exactly why you and I need to intervene. We have the opportunity to affect circumstances, to be a force of positive change on the environment of people who are asking for help. It is not for us to discern who does and does not need help, but simply to attend to those who ask for it, and to determine how to best effect positive change. That may or may not begin with giving somebody in need a dollar. Or it may entail something scarier. Something terrifying and daunting. It may entail beginning a relationship. Because only through a relationship can you get to know a person. Only through listening to them can you learn their story, and begin to understand why they are the way they are. And only through understanding a problem deeply, through empathetic dialogue, can you come even close to recommending a satisfactory solution.

God, I pray to muster the inspiration and courage.

“If I share with you my story, won’t you share your dollar with me / And I said I need dollar, dollar, a dollar is what I need / And if I share with you my story would you share your dollar with me / Bad times are comin’ and I reap what I don’t sow / Well let me tell you somthin’ all that glitters ain’t gold.”

(Source: stewart-little.com)

A letter to a friend

Thanks for your long and thoughtful letter. As always, I loved finding mail from you in my mailbox, and enjoy your reading about your latest experiences, adventures, and struggles. And, like you suggest, I agree we seem to be dealing with similar issues at our stage in life, as I relate to and have been thinking about many of the same issues you wrote about.

In my world, “agile” is a term that refers to a project process that allows for small teams to develop features, push them live, and then revise and build on them. It’s a way for a team to continually learn as they’re building a product, rather than a more traditional process where they set out to build a complete product and then push it to the market. There’s lower risk with the agile method, and it allows for course correction. In another lifetime, I think it’s similar to the way sailors used celestial navigation to correct course and chart their voyages. In both cases, it’s all about getting to where you need to be, which is what life is all about—the journey, as they say. And in recent years, I’ve been course correcting, mostly with regards to relationships—deciding with whom to spend time, who is worth spending time with, how many people to maintain serious friendships with, how I should be using social media to maintain friendships and whether that’s a worthy and useful channel to do so. What it boils down to is that good people deserving of friendship are due a greater amount of attention and love on my part, and I want to make sure that I’m leaving enough time and space and devote those energies to them. And I agree about “friends being a reflection of yourself.” One thing I came to understand when I was studying philosophy in college is that at present I am the sum total of the people with whom and environments in which I have spent my time. That realization has caused me to not drift so carelessly on the seas of life, but to be much more discriminate about the people I choose to spend time with and invest in, and the places and projects and hobbies I choose to endeavor upon. Businessmen, rappers, and hustlers use the standard refrain “time is money”, but time is also your story. So I think of my life is terms of narrative…I’m writing my story every day, so as these chapters are written, what will the final book be like? What’s the genre? What’s the plot? Who are the characters? What’s the quality of authorship? Would people want to read my book? What might they take away from it? Would the stories endure? 

What amazes me is how much our external environment determines our internal capacities and pre-dispositions. I’ve long been sensitive to the fact that we don’t choose to be born into our families during a certain time or place. But those specifics set the course for our physical and psychological compositions, our lifelong range of opportunities, including where we can work (or not), who we can marry (or not), and be friends with (or not). Growing and changing and moving into different social circles is complicated and tied up with fear, doubt, loathing, misplaced admiration, misunderstandings, and false perceptions. Relationships are drama, and the majority of a drama is whether relationships will happen at all (which is why a lot of Rom Coms are about the protagonist pursuing the potential significant other), and then to what extent they can be strengthened. In your situation, the drama seems to be a lack of cultural commonalities, which is what the Peace Corps is about—creating more cross-cultural commonalities; it’s very difficult work, which is why they’ve a fairly competitive application process and only take on people with your strength of character. 

To your question, “Can your best friends be people you’ve only known a short amount of time and know just a little about?” I believe they can be, and that those are often the people you need to work to hold on to and love in whatever capacity you can. You love them quickly because you intuit a lot about them based on shared cultural values and social vocabularies. You love them now, but you also know you’ll love them in the future, and because of that magnetism you can feel confident they will still love you, as well. I think a more mature understanding of these types of relationships is that these people will continue to carry you with them in their memory long after you stop hanging out, joking, laughing, corresponding, calling, emailing, and facebooking. I was reading an article on The New York Review of Books, entitled “Why Finish Books?”, in which the writer described how he came to the understanding that you can read a book, not finish, and still derive great value from it and recommend to others without feeling guilty of ‘not having read it’. The parallel is like saying you can’t call yourself the friend of another or say you love another person because you have not witnessed the entirety of their life and so you cannot fully judge the quality of that person, which of course, is bullshit. 

Your comments about expectations also resonated with me. I think expectations are the key to everything in life. Developing an emotional sensitivity to the people around you is key to keeping your own expectations in line with the reality of a given situation, whether in friendships, with partners, with family, or with colleagues. And having balanced expectations is especially important to staying sane and even-keeled and being incrementally and consistently successful in life. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it and other people will appreciate your efforts. 

I think the main thing to keep in mind is to always keep trying. It can be exhausting, but if you want to develop deeper friendships with people who may be good, but don’t fit your normal mold, reassure yourself that the effort is worth it, and invest yourself into understanding them more, and seeing the world as they do. And if they’re the good people you expect they are, they’ll eventually come around, recognizing your well-intentioned efforts, and reciprocate your love and care. 

Hugs,
Stewart

P.S. Thanks for the bug guts!

“

Government was not the only factor in the thinning of societies. A cultural revolution had replaced downtowns with big isolated malls with chain stores. The information revolution had replaced community organizations that held weekly face-to-face meetings with specialized online social networking where like found like. But government policy had unwitting played a role in all these things.

The result was the diminution of social capital that Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone and other books. People became more loosely affiliated. The webs of relationship that habituate self-restraint, respect for others, and social sympathy lost their power. The effects were sometimes liberating for educated people, who possessed the social capital to explore the new loosely knit world, but they were devastating for those without that sort of human capital. Family structures began to disintegrate, especially for the less educated. Out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed. Crime rose. Trust in institutions collapsed.

David Brooks, The Social Animal

Brooks has offered me some insight into the socio-economic factors that have developed over the past several decades that helped to shape my environment, and explain why, in a hyper-connected society, I feel so out of touch and emotionally unengaged with the people in my life. Born with the requisite social capital, I’ve been able to assemble my own social networks, piecemeal, creating opportunities from connections that most people would overlook. But these types of connections are tenuous at best, and only serve to facilitate the accomplishment of individually-motivated goals, resulting in connections that dissolve just as quickly as they were formed. I don’t need another fucking social network—I need a tribe.