Thoughts on interpersonal relationships, and being compassionate.

Couple quick notes, this one is expanding off of my first two posts, though primarily my first one here. As well as some thoughts i've been ruminating on for a while. And as per usual, tends to be a little winding, but that's how we roll here :)

One thing i've noticed throughout my life is that we have a very rigidly structured system of your level of intimate knowledge on another person. It ranges from mutual friends, to people that have been married for 30 years. It's interesting to me to see that this structure has sort of "naturally" developed around the human experience. But what's more interesting to me is the fact that people seem to uphold it by default. There is a value in it as a system. For example it's a great system for introducing two people who know each other as a mutual friend.

Personally i hate classifications, I think any system where you intentionally create an explicit point across a spectrum, is like schrodingers binary answer. You can try and classify something that doesn't have an explicit boundary well. It's probably not going to be great, and even if it is, you'll find something that defies it. This only gets worse with scale, you need more and more classifications, and suddenly they no longer serve a purpose.

The reason i mention this is because i find it often negatively influences my interpersonal relationships with other people. The system that we currently have often lays out very explicit expectations in romantic relationships particularly, though this can also be present in mutual ones as well. People often say that communication is the sole defining factor of what makes a relationship. You ever wonder why? It's because people have a certain expectation of how that relationship will work, and it's those expectations that cause problems. Now to be clear, even without these expectations, communication is still very important. It's a must for all relationships.

The primary thing here is that if you go into a relationship without expectations, communication is much easier, arguably it's the default as nobody has any idea of what to expect. It's a much more personable way of looking at relationships. It allows you to focus on yourself, and the other person, rather than both of you collectively as a unit. Which is important, because you're removing a layer of abstraction within that relationship, which more than likely means that it's going to work better.

Likewise, along with this, you also focus a lot more on the actual interactions themselves, which are what I personally value in an inter personal relationship, to make my point here, let's say i'm a hypothetical friend of yours. I don't care about you. You as an individual are simply a person, what i care about is the interactions that we have. I don't care about you, i care about what you have to say. There is simply little to no value in simply, being around people. (this is why driving, or being in crowded areas often feels inhuman) The reason why we find friendships to be valuable is because we talk to other people. If you still don't understand it, what i'm saying is that you can care about other people by simply caring about what they say.

to throw in a little tangent here, keep all of this in mind with gossip, and relevant social communities. There are things worth talking about, there are things worth being mad about, and there are things that aren't. Gossip is not one of them.

This may sound really counter intuitive, depending on how you view other people. But what i can say from experience, as a person with somewhat high charisma is that it has done nothing to my interactions with people, aside from potentially being beneficial. It removes you a little bit from the interaction, while also allowing you to be much more focused on the person themselves. There are a lot of people out there, not all of them think and experience the world in the way that i do. i would venture most people here probably think i'm insane, and that's fair honestly. But my point here is that, you will meet a lot of people like me, in various stages of their life. You'll probably meet a lot of normal people throughout your life as well. At the end of the day we're all people, and we all enjoy human interaction.

Personally i've found throughout my life that i like interacting with weird people a lot more, it gives me a more complete worldview, makes me more compassionate for others, as well as puts some magic into human consciousness and interaction itself. Human relationships should be cherished, they are not a normal everyday occurrence, even though we're social creatures, built to experience them daily, we can still conceptualize them, and utilize them in a way not known to be possible in any other form of life, as far as we know. It's important to remember this, And it also allows us to appreciate the much simpler forms of life, animals, plants, insects, etc.

and for the usual outro segment regarding some of this stuff: Here's my usual parting statements.

If you'd like to interact with weirder people, or just learn more about people in general. Here are a couple of tips:

most importantly, getting someone talking, if you can get someone to talk about the things that interest or bother them, or the things that they like. You will learn the most about them this way, as well as strike the most interesting and engaging conversations.
finding people to talk to is a big one, obviously. I find that online communities will often have a lot of weirder people, the trick here is interacting with them 1 on 1. It's a lot harder to gauge it when people are conversing in a group setting, because there's a lot more going on, and it's just generally a simpler interaction. I've found on discord (i leave my DMs open, yes i know i'm insane.) That people will just show up in my DMs sometimes. It's great.
In an IRL setting, people tend to group together, so you'll wanna find the weird group, not the small friend groups, the groups of people who just are. People who are alone can be iffy, sometimes they don't want to interact with others, it's best to respect that, other times they don't mind, personally i really don't mind.
depending on your friends, mutual friends can be pretty interesting, it's worthwhile when it feels like it is.
most important thing here, don't do it to be polite, do it because you think people are interesting and you're genuinely curious about learning about them, the faster you can get into a casual conversational tone the better. (people can tell, and often times, it's just not that interesting.)
most relevant, there are a lot of weird people, be prepared for them, it's up to you how you deal with it, i just like to roll with it. It's interesting enough as is. Although keep in mind, ghosting people is often a dick move.

myself being a weird individual i've developed a pretty good "spidey sense" for people like this, i can generally pick them out of the group pretty quickly, and i will generally get along with them pretty well. Most people are already capable of this to a degree, being involved in normal society, the outliers are pretty obvious sometimes. It's the people between obvious and "just barely normal" that are interesting.

Years ago one of the nicest people i've ever met was just kind to be kind, literally no other reason. I will always remember them. They've taught me some of the most valuable information i will ever learn. Just be nice. It's incredible what it can do for other people. Genuinely one of the very few people i deeply respect, and consider to be a better person than i am.

This time i bothered to proof read it, standards are increasing here at KillingTimeItself Inc. :)