I was talking to someone last week about relationships and he who is currently single, would like to find someone and settle down. The problem is that he travels a lot for his work which makes it difficult to meet potential partners and of course, for the settling down part. This is a common position of humans, there is the want to achieve something but the behaviors don't support the accomplishment of the goals.
At a basic level, if we are unable to put ourselves in a position where we are not going to come across the opportunities that lead us to where we are going to go, it is akin to trying to get rich by winning the lottery, without buying a ticket. It is not impossible, just highly unlikely to lead to where we think we want to be. Opportunity is found from our environment and therefore, what we surround ourselves with matters.
Of course, this doesn't just happen with relationships, it happens with all things we consume. Essentially, we are consuming the experience around us and the adage, you are what you eat really does hold true. It is difficult to become a mathematician, an athlete or a musician without exposing ourselves to the practice of the field. It is also very difficult to have money without the right work or save money while filling our attention with advertising material.
The environment we put ourselves in becomes a catalyst for our behaviors as for the most part, we are highly influenced and manipulable. This means that if we are not careful with who and what we surround ourselves with in our lives, we are likely to end up either mimicking or being programmed to behave in ways that might not lead us to where we want to go. At some point though, the programmed habit is so strong in us that we identify with it and believe that we are it.
When we believe we are our actions, it makes it difficult to change because change then becomes "losing" who we are and if you haven't noticed, people don't like loss. However, many people might lose their future hopes and dreams because they are unable to lose themselves now. This is exacerbated by the fact that we aren't very good at identifying our needs, desires and of course, fears.
What we need might not be what we want and what we want or need might be impossible to have if we fear to do the things that lead to gaining them. These are internal conflicts that we rarely identify and when these stretch across large swaths of time, it is even more difficult as it feels like there is always tomorrow.
A good example of there is tomorrow thinking is when it comes to investing into uncertainty. We fear the loss of our investment so we hold back until we are 'certain' but the more certain something is, the less return it will offer. When it comes to something like a trend, an earlier adopter has the most to gain but will also run the most risk of losing their investment, whether time, money, effort.
This is likely a good reason why one should never invest what one isn't willing to lose completely which is another way of saying, never invest with what one actually needs. This is a challenge of course because most of us don't actually know what we need and therefore go after more of what we want. This means that we are potentially risking needs for desires and if we get our desires filled, we may still not be satisfied because we are still missing what we need. Much like how eating empty calories doesn't satisfy hunger.
Going back to relationships, there are a lot of lonely people in this world who are longing for connection and intimacy but are not putting themselves into environments where that is possible. They use consumptive distractions that satisfy wants as a surrogate but rarely feel full, engaged, satisfied. They might be consuming the want for money, the pleasure of food or the numbing of entertainment.
If we knew what we needed well we would likely drop the consumption of desire and pick up the trail of need fulfillment instead. This sounds like another chase but it is only a chase because we weren't listening in the first place and instead embedded ourselves into environments that weren't conducive to supporting our needs. The interesting thing is that we can have all of the accouterments we could ever want but still feel dissatisfied if one need isn't met. This is the definition of need.
Of course from a survival of life aspect we might not need much but as humans, we are not just physical creatures, we are also psychological and emotional beings who are able to imagine things in the past and future as well as learn from sources we will never experience. This sets us up for a great deal of conflict if we are unable to recognize the difference between need and want and unable to overcome our fears of failure, loss and behavior.
We each live our life and our experience of it is uniquely ours but as we start relying more and more on groupthink and algorithms looking to satisfy average and economy, the less we are likely to discover our needs or create our personal world in a way that surrounds us with ways to get what we need, not just what we want.
I wonder, if we could accurately identify our needs and objectively look at our behaviors, how much of what we do is counter-productive to satisfying ourselves as individuals, how much of our world is engineered in a way that it keeps us chasing desires that will never fill our needs and how many people are working hard but will never get to where they want to be because they can't let go of where they are.
If we take a look around our lives we should be surrounded by the things that lead us to where we want to go, the things that catalyze the thoughts that turn into behavioral change and the circumstances that lead to opportunity.
Have you designed your life to be as favorable as possible for where you want to be? It is easy to have excuses why not but it isn't that hard to make small shifts that will compound against each other and grow into something more. The world of consumerism doesn't recommend looking at our needs though, it is engineered to fill desire only. What that means is no product will ever satisfy us completely by design, that is up to us.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]