Other People

I met my wive some 37 years ago. She fell head over heels in love with me, I fell hopelessly in love with her a year later. We've been together ever since, raised a son and finally got married two and a half years ago. Through her and our son I've learned more about myself, about who I really am, than ever before.

What I'm trying to say is that we learn about ourselves through other people. Yesterday I used the quote "hell is other people", but didn't remember immediately how I knew about it, so I looked it up: it's from Jean-Paul Sartre's play "No Exit". He didn't try to say that other people are terrible though. Let me summarize the play for you. Three people, a man and two women, one of which is a lesbian, die and go to hell. Far from the eternal fire and physical torture we normally imagine hell to be, in Sartre's play hell is a room. A room from which there's no escape, which means these three people are convicted to each other's presence for all eternity.

In the end, the three end up in some bizarre love-triangle in which no one gets what they want, no one is able to get from the others what they need. You see, so much of what we do and who we think we are, comes from a quest for the approval of others. The man longs for the love of the lesbian woman, who longs for the other woman, who wants the man. Neither is able to get the approval from the one they want, which leads to one of them saying: "hell is other people".

Sartre was of the opinion that Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" was too shallow. He thought that the "I" can only exist in the context of other people and objects. Those other people are also objects in relation to the subjective self. And we seek others' approval by objectifying ourselves for the subjective selves of the others. This all may sound very pessimistic, and Sartre once described happiness as a myth. But I'm not so sure if this depending on others for self-fulfillment is a bad thing or a reason to feel less self-empowered.

In problem-solving it's a well known fact that having a diverse group attacking a problem brings better solutions faster. If a problem can't be solved, it's time to have it approached from different perspectives. This is, by the way, one of the best arguments for multiculturalism. Could the same be true for the betterment of the self? I think it is. Sure, my wive and son have been my constant sounding board for the past decades, and I've intimately come to know myself through their eyes, but who I am is the result of the countless relations, long, short and fleeting, to countless other people in my life.

Ultimately I think our interdependence, even for self-validation, is a beautiful thing. However, we're losing touch with each other; technology and economics (and a pandemic) have conspired to increasingly lock ourselves up in a self-made prison with a single window; an LCD screen of some sort most of the time. My heart hurts a little when I see entire families, dining out in a restaurant, each captivated by their own mobile phone. In the bus or train people don't talk to each other but instead watch a little screen with headphones plugged in, each in their own private universe.

When I read yet another article about incels I think: they must not get out very much. And when I meet young people, some of them are truly "socially awkward". I can't help but feeling that the rise in suicides (mostly male) is partially caused by the absence of real social interaction in their lifes. We need other people in our lifes. Lots of 'm. That's not hell, it's reality, a necessity. We live in the age of individualism, of self-made, our own bootstraps and whatnot, but in the end we're social creatures who aren't worth anything on our own. We're forever locked inside the subjective selves of others as objects, but that's not a prison we'll ever experience firsthand. So I say celebrate the others, and through them celebrate yourself.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!