Advice for Relationships: with others, but also with yourself

In my opinion, an important thing to have in order to cultivate good relationships with others, is that you should try to have a good relationship with yourself.

Specifically you want to be such good pals with yourself that you can call yourself on your own bullshit without hating yourself. Remember, what you think does not define who you are. Sometimes very good, disciplined, or smart, or whatever the hell you want to be as an adjective, kinds of people have the stupidest, rudest, selfish, most idiotic thoughts. The important thing is they are aware how dumb those thoughts are, and are able to ignore them or focus their attention to prioritize the better ones, leaving those unwanted thoughts to slowly fade from memory and irrelevancy. It’s like what Hannah Montana has been trying to tell us all this time: nobody’s perfect. Don’t be so afraid of imperfection that you never improve, but also in order to improve you have to know what you’re doing that’s suboptimal, and truly think about what you could do better. You have to be honest with yourself on this. But also don’t punish yourself for not being AMAZING and perfect, cause it’s an iterative process and as long as you do a little bit everyday and get a little bit better than the day before you’re golden.

I feel like sometimes we get caught up in the moment, caught up in an argument that we forget where we are and where we’ll be. Sometimes it’s worth it to take the short term L and learn from our mistakes, over maybe taking the W but never improve so we end up having to take the same L a week later or years later. It’s like cheating on math in school? You might ace the quiz but you’ll just fall behind on the fundamentals so you’re kind of screwed for the next test and the rest of the module. But cheating is easier than not, and that’s why so many people do it.

Specifically, for people who want some specific, actionable advice and not just me rambling/waffling around, waving my hands in the air, philosophizing for myself, you could try practicing this concept out with the next time you’re in an argument. Try asking yourself: “What if I’m actually wrong?”.

Heck, here’s more FUN questions to ask: “What if I were the other person? Why would I so strongly believe in this? What do I gain from this, what do I want? Why am I taking the time to argue for this? What are my values and fears? How do I know what they’re saying is true: have they lived their experiences or is this a second hand account? How do I know what I believe in is true?” Like maybe they believe in something you find that’s kinda problematic. But the deal breaker you see in your argument for why you disagree might not even register as that big of an issue for them because they have different values. Or they might even bring up sources online that might not totally be credible that you have to roast them for trusting in.

In this day and age of information we can’t ever take anything at face value anymore, cause literally everyone’s grandma, cat, dog, uncle, neighbor can just post whatever they want on a whim. High school essays had more citations and were held to high standards than to like 90% of whatever people type. Also I made that 90% statistic up. In fact this whole article I’m writing right now is kinda literally just brain thought that bubbled to the surface and is currently being churned out so don’t take this shit for face value either. Look. Would you rather listen to someone who’s studied a topic for 100 years or someone who just read a wiki article on the subject? CLEARLY one is more expert than the other. So make sure you take into account the credentials of who’s saying what and let that weigh into how much you can trust the source.

I think even without technology people tended to just take ideas at face value? And it could get really toxic sometimes when one person decides that someone or something or some group is stupid, and people just parrot it back and forth to the point that people forget why the negative connotation exists, just that it does, and there’s like no concrete personal evidence for the belief. People wanna be skeptics about science, the government, but can’t even be skeptics of their local friends and family. Sometimes the closest things are the ones that we’re most blind to because the familiarity of these ideas convince us to take them for granted. There’s trust we’ve built in our relationships too.

Anyway, like another example is how Kpop stars are held to such high standards and people can say stuff like “that one singer looks like a bitch (curse resting bitch face) so therefore she must be a bitch, she must be bored, or ungrateful, or lazy”. I feel like sometimes things are more subjective, and people can kind of take the subjectivity to an extreme, and then if it’s parroted around enough and you hear it enough you just believe it. It just becomes part of your subconscious, and the toxicity is normalized. You think, oh everyone else believes this, and there must be a reason they all have their reasons so I don’t have to do the work of actually thinking for myself and I’ll just take it for granted, but then everyone else’s reasons are that someone must have a reason so it’s just stupid all around. Plus sometimes people rip into and criticize other people because they feel insecure themselves and so it feels good to not think too hard.

Also this topic reminds me of the advice my high school english teacher told our class one day: the best way to feel confident in a decision is to argue for the opposite side, play devil’s advocate-that way while you might end up with more questions than you started, you’ll decide to change your mind (probably not but you never know), or you’ll end up more certain in your own decision. Changing someones mind is damn near impossible. Sure, it hurts to be wrong. It’s embarrassing! But the upside to truly changing your mind is that you hopefully realized something better in your new decision that you would’ve missed out if you didn’t do that hard, difficult, but thankful work of doing your research.

OK, so now that I talked about how people are fallible, but how our ability to change is one of our strengths (as long as it’s a calculated change and not just oscillating constantly for the heck of it) I’m going to rehash that same concept but in a slightly different angle: namely from the relationship to yourself to a relationship with other people.

Sometimes, what’s common sense to one person is a whole revelation to another, which leads to a kind of miscommunication can kill relationships. After all, how can you solve a problem you don’t even believe that you have?

If you think something’s bad, and another person thinks it’s good how does that make you feel? Ignored? Invalidated? Like you’re living in a delusional nonsense world? This kind of feeling is not conductive to good relationships.

I lived through this dynamic blindly when I was growing up, and because of it I felt insecure and misunderstood in my relationships with my family, friends, and even strangers. As a dumb, snot-nosed kid I always thought I had all the right ideas, and everyone else who thought otherwise was pretty delusional. I was just too blind to see that the world was much different than how I imagined. It’s acceptable for a kid to be stubborn and ignorant, but I think even adults (who have decades of experience and actual brain development) can fall victim to a kind of myopia.

I would define this as an ego based blindness. Basically, nobody wants to admit they’re wrong because it’s an attack on their sense of self, and it can get super embarrassing. When you’re wrong (it’s not a question of if) you can handle it gracefully by resolving to not make the same mistakes, and appreciating the difficulty the other person went through to get to you by thanking them. If you upset or angry it’s ok to take time away to cool down and just remember that people can change and you don’t have to hold onto ideas that might cultivate toxicity in your life and stop you from building good relationships or understanding the world in a more clearer view. Sometimes people weaponize our blindness and emotions against us to take power, or to blame and divert attention from themselves but we just have to make sure we try our best to evaluate the situation and it’s not an easy thing to do. Tons of people fall for cons and conspiracy theories everyday, but I think sniffing out peoples’ bullshit is a skill you can practice and improve at.

If you want to improve your relationships you should confront your blind spots, in yourself and in others in a loving, constructive way, and also be open to learning or respecting/acknowledging other points of views. Also try not to make decisions for other people cause that’s a no-no and kind of a boundary violation. Also, another addendum but if you run around trying to change people’s minds without their asking for it or give a huge text wall of advice to people unsolicited they’re gonna hate you cause you’re essentially saying I’m right and you’ve been unenlightened here you go peasant here’s some enlightenment, so just try to do this when the time’s right and people wanna discuss and understand things, or if the topics really, really important because no one knows everything.

If people close to you criticize you or try to bring topics to your attention, and you really do trust their judgement, take the time to listen. Sometimes they might be wrong, sometimes they might be right. Try to understand with also a healthy dose of skepticism. And also it’s good to every now and then challenge some of your own beliefs that you might just believe in but not truly understand. It’s hard to understand, and definitely impossible to understand everything but we owe it to ourselves and future generations to be the best investigators/improvers of our own lives as we can.