“The hardest part of living is to exist truthfully; especially if it means exhibiting parts of life in public. We’ve all learned to survive in a new world where the depersonalization of truth has become the lasting circumstance of every human interaction, it’s people I swear I miss the most.”
Is the world becoming less real due to the lack of significance?
Have you ever left a conversation feeling like you have wasted valuable time because of all the meaningless interaction?! and all those thoughts you have expressed and put forward, were somehow broken down to the minimum of their meaning.
Since I came across the above quote in an interview article on Collecteurs magazine I cannot get it off my mind, in just a few lines it communicates how we face up in the present-day society; depersonalising truths and lacking intimacy with one another. We live in a world where image, status and recognition is more important than anything else. It’s seeming very likely that some of us are under Plato’s allegory of the cave — forming alter egos, replacing self-esteem with narcissism; constantly trying to feed an unconscious drive of justifying our at-core “small” acts and desires to ourselves. As social media is deeply embedded in our daily lives, we are further manipulated in the way we view ourselves and the world around us.
Intimacy, vulnerability and truthfulness are today’s luxuries, not only for creating that space with another person, but also the courage, love and respect needed so to maintain healthy relationships. It is in our best interest to generate trust in our social circles — to dare believe that deep down in someone’s being we can find resonance or have an honest conversation without implicit commenting, to be capable to smile sincerely, think in depth and speak in an all-inclusive vision instead of focusing on mechanical-personal interest. Why has it become a daily urge to shove our opinion and perception on to others instead of heartfully listen and what do these acts validate at any core, either individual or collective? What will it take to make space for language and pure feeling coexist.
It is fundamentally acceptable, that your work environment and lifestyle might require you to keep this cold and diplomatic exterior (at some degree) so to get things done, but I have noticed that people falsely view this state as a form of superiority, acting it out through all their interactions, eliminating any possibility of becoming a catalyst and enchance interactions in proufound ways. Being human is to be imperfect, expressing vulnerability isn’t shameful but rather a long process of reaching clarity and we shouldn’t take it away from ourselves or others, especially in these strange times we live in.
In contemplation of those few lines, I think that stepping out of ourselves for a few milliseconds so to find true aloneness and belonging without the need of material possesion or self-projection should become our meditative daily practice in finding significance within and without.
“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”
