I feel like we live in a world where everyone thinks that they’ve been cheated. Or everyone thinks that they’re owed something. I’m guilty of it too.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how relationships, platonic or romantic, end. And I don’t mean situations where one person clearly violates the other persons boundaries, knowingly. But, more like accidental situations where an action taints one persons perspective of the other. I’ve been guilty of that too. Both sides of it.
I think humans are naturally wired to believe that the bad outweighs the good. Even those “mental health” advocates who stress that valuing and prioritizing the good moments in life will bring one nirvana. Why should we even have to make the effort to prioritize the good over the bad? Shouldn’t it be natural?
The most animalistic trait of humanity is our innate tendency to make decisions based on personal gain. Not only physically or situationally, but emotionally, mentally, spiritually… I’ll say it again, but im guilty of it.
I’ve ended relationships for personal gain. For instance, I was in a friendship scenario where I felt as though I was villianized constantly. I felt like a manufacturer of apologies, mostly ingenuine apologies to sedate conflict. That friendship pretty much ended once I made a conscious effort to benefit myself mentally; I started to stick up for myself. Yet, I was accused of being confrontational and disloyal.
That inherently was a good form of personal gain. But I constantly wonder if I was trying to satisfy a victim complex in my mind; maybe I was being confrontational and disloyal. I did feel cheated in this relationship.
I constantly try to understand the perspective of others in a transformative way. I try to take on anothers conditions and see each scenario through their mind. But I think I have to learn to accept that I will never be fully able to.
The mind is so interesting in that it is a combination of every single experience that one has lived. Every single, waking moment and emotion that I have seen, heard, felt, smelled, even tasted, has imprinted on the decisions I make and perspectives I take. Isn’t that crazy to think about?
I think I’ve definitely made conscious bad decisions. I never apologize, but I do make these decisions. But I think I can genuinely say I behave in a way that prioritizes doing “the right thing”. But “the right thing” to me will never be identical to someone else’s idea of goodness.
“If then virtue is something in the soul, and necessarily good, it must be a matter of mindfulness. For all other qualities of soul are in themselves neither good nor harmful. As accompanied by forethought or thoughtlessness, they become good or harmful. This argument shows that virtue, being good, must be a kind of mindfulness.”
― Meno
There’s an unspoken standard of goodness. But this “mindfulness” is subjective. Maybe I was in the wrong for the way I approached “sticking up for myself”. I thought my actions were good. I thought I had been cheated. And I considered that this was not a universal truth; not everyone thought the condition I was in within this friendship was unbearable. But what I was unable to achieve, and will never be able to achieve, is my friends’ truth. I am unsatisfied with my perspective alone.
I don’t mean to say that relationships are hopeless because of this. I just mean to emphasize the cruciality of communication, to its able extent. And quite honestly, I think its hard having a mindset focused on this level of attempted empathy. Humans are naturally focused on perspective over situation. Biases will inevitably fuck us all.
But unfortunately, society’s inability to compromise completely on the definition of “good” will continue to harvest a world where we all think we’ve been cheated. We’ve inevitably brainwashed ourselves.
