With the wisdom imparted by the age nearing the 30s, which is only going to be dismantled by my experiences post 30, my current understanding of how people in your life appear, disappear, reappear or retain has changed substantially. From bunching the people together from the crowd, like stacking your favourite crayons from the pack, painting every picture in the colour book with them, to creating batches of different people for different phases in life, like the set of clothes you wore two summers ago, are not fit for Goa this summer. The philosophy has evolved deeper by considering the anomalies from both ends of the spectrum.
People around you can be considered to be a cluster of unique sheep, who even though are unique but their uniqueness won’t cross the foundation of being a sheep. Let’s start it with people being inherently needy and selfish. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But to be okay with it, you need to acknowledge it. After acknowledging it, you need to assess yourself. Only when you know the categories of needy and selfish in which you and the people around you fall, you are better equipped to make rational relationships, that will survive.
If you are a person who needs someone to discuss things that happens with you to make sense of, you are needy. If you are someone who needs to discuss things at times with others to get just an opinion, you are needy at that moment. If you just share things with people at times as a transaction to what they share, you are pretending to be needy.
Similarly, if you expect things from people, you are selfish. If you expect things from people because you believe you would do it for them, still selfish. If you don’t expect things from others because one should believe in giving than taking, you are a saint (it exists in individualistic situations mostly). If you don’t expect things from others because there is a chance they’ll betray it, you are self-centered selfish.
People who think it does not apply when you are in a relationship, it kind of does. That’s what people mean when they say you have changed after being with someone.
Again, it’s my philosophy, so feel free to pick up what you like, drop what you don’t and make amends where you feel like it for yourself. Or maybe simply discard it and make your own. But the idea behind it is to assess or to predict the behaviour of the people’s interaction with your life.
As far as I have come to know myself, I don’t relate much with too needy, apart from at times pretending to be one, but I am partially selfish. I tend to be selfish with people until I realize I am being so. Once I know it, I get rid of it, selfishness i.e. If you think that is me riding on the high horse, let me break it down for you a bit further. This act of getting rid of, selfishness towards others, is the greatest possible kind of selfishness I could show for myself. Because the awareness I have towards having any possible dependency on people around me leads me to a place where every act I do seems to come from a place where nothing in return is expected. Which is as wrong as it can be, as what I expect is my peace that comes by not diving too deep.
This only sounds saintly, but it gives birth to relations that are usually heavily unbalanced. It’s plain stupidity wrapped in nobility to fool people who haven’t witnessed true nobility because growth is always mutual. So the people that I make good long-lasting relationships with, are those who are stupid enough to follow the same school of thought and just distribute with open arms. Luckily, I have found enough to survive.
Now when you know this profile, you know how long you could handle a person like me in your life. For example, a needy person would love me, but a needy and selfish person would first love me and then continuously put up complaints about my lack of availability and the relation being driven by them, which will not be wrong in essence, but the point they’ll miss is, even without them taking a lead which means dialing down their selfishness, the relationship will still go somewhere. Only the steering wheel will not be in their hand.
Or maybe a pretending to be needy person, like me, will be perfectly suitable to be around me. But if they are self-centred selfish, it will create an internal clash with their neediness, making it a very shallow relation.
These are only but two parameters, and there are many more. Like the level of assumptions an individual carry, or degree of openness towards changes. These not only refine the profiling and comparisons better but helps in taking a knowledgeable call about the direction of your relationships with people around you.
I have tweaked my standing with many people around me based on this understanding lately, and I have yet to find an anomaly that makes me want to tweak this philosophy further. But the bottom line is, it truly is important who you keep around yourself, and why. Even if you don’t agree with anything written above, think about it and maybe come at your conclusion, and you will find your life taking a turn for the best.
ABSINRAW 