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You sit on your couch watching TV. Thoughts start filling your head about what you could be doing instead. You also take a moment not to think about much at all, which would seem to be more of the point of sitting there in the first place. Now, depending on how you look at it, thinking about nothing is a very selfish act. You are putting your non-thought, your personal resources, into doing nothing, except maybe consuming a commercial. This is selfish. Don’t you have the right to experience this? With how busy things can get, doing nothing is many times a recommended vacation.
This doesn’t bother most of us because most people accept this type of behavior. What seems to matter most for voters is the person they will vote for not necessarily the policies they support. How often has a friend said, “I just vote the one that looks good?” If you swear you don’t have friends like that, think again. More than you might like to believe, voting decisions seem like well intentioned educated votes, but we know that many Americans vote on a single issue (See: Single-Issue Voters: Will they make a difference on November 2nd?). We support individuality, personal growth, and independent decisions. If we fantasize about committed relationships then we are ignoring that we are constantly exposed to positive images of the “single life” and mainly negative, although sometimes hilarious, ones about settled committed relationships. All that struggle can’t be fun. Plus, if you want to ignore yourself and others to watch TV or vote for the hot one you are less likely to offend someone if you aren’t connected to or with others.
So why not stay alone? I speak from experience and can say that people don’t always impede on your life and to think like this is just living in the future and ignoring the present. People can enhance and help you grow faster in your experiences. Even if a free-spirited person who “does her own thing” and “goes where the wind takes her,” this experience must include people, even if in their absence. Every individual person is a part of our social web, meaning that we can’t exclude their affect on ourselves.
What am I trying to say? You must put yourself first, alongside others. Put yourself first and get to know yourself, take some time away. Watch some TV and forget but don’t forget that your absence has an impact on your social web too. This is where you need to begin to focus not on how many friends you have or don’t have but on what friends or significant-others you have or don’t have. Meeting someone new is at the cost of getting to know someone you know better. What is more valuable? You have to weigh the two, the value of a particular meeting vs. the value of knowing more about an existing connection. These people are both variables in a decision, to ignore the human side of an equation is to ignore 100% of the value/dis-value that may exist. The impact of everyone around you and in contact with you is unmeasurable. Don’t think too much, focus, and invest wisely. You need to recognize the value in non-value. If I were to lose a friend, I would feel emotion but forget to recognize what changed because of it, which is change, or value, from something of seemingly non-value.
If you have a infinite desire for friends + significant-others then you have no one trained in being close to/with you. Infinity value becomes a total near zero. If you focus your desire (focus is not an exact number in this case but a direction of thought towards the best total value) for friends + significant-others by acknowledging other people and spending time on a previous connection, there will be ups and downs but a significantly larger net value.
The journey toward a core interpersonal discovery:
Putting yourself first, with another.
Putting yourself first, alongside others.
Putting yourself first, alongside everything.
Being first and selfish (in a good way) because of and with everything and recognizing it.
I wish you the best of luck in discovering your social core. Whether it’s significant-others or great friends and five or thirty core individuals, stop thinking big and focus small. Surround yourself with a number of mental live-ins, they may live on the other side of the globe or in your bed, but with everything you know they are there to stay, one way or another.
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