Have been furiously cramming podcast after podcast of conversations with people that have gone through so much pain, loss and suffering hoping to find some sort of comfort in their wisdom and the reminder (sometimes painful and alarmingly shatters the construct of your self indulgence) that we all share the same kind of pain- only just different degrees of it. The humanity and interdependence of it all slowly strings together a blanket of reasoning and understanding of my current lackluster attitude towards everything in life. It’s been a couple of days where I wake up refusing to get out of bed, having really bad sleeps and feeling a huge empty void whenever I am alone and silent with myself.
Currently listening to Daniel Kahneman speak about Why We Contradict ourselves and he freaking won a Nobel Prize because of his contributions and research on behavioural economics which had underlying theories and concepts that bled into our everyday decision making - conscious or not. The deep truth that we are all struggling to find logic and certainty in this terribly uncertain world is something that everyone is grappling with. He argues that we try to convince ourselves that there’s some sort of logic and rational understanding behind things that we do and things that others believe in, however, that’s not always the case.
I think what I’m trying to say is that maybe once I come to wholeheartedly accept that everything is uncertain, unclear and any decision made after contemplating, weighing the pros and cons... will ultimately still be a hopeful gamble, an opportunistic action of throwing myself into the great unknown with the mask of thinking I made a calculated risk-mitigating decision to protect myself. No. It’s not. Whether that be in my decisions of falling in love, loving someone, being in a relationship, quitting my job, switching careers etc. It goes on! For someone that holds on so tightly to the certainty of things, relishing in the constant and believing in permanence- wrapping my head around the concept that humans are flawed animals that aren’t as rational as we thought ourselves out to be is somewhat comforting but also really throwing me off balance right now.
He also mentioned that beliefs are fleeting and values can be edited, changed and restructured - as we have seen over the course of humanity throughout the centuries. Which makes me think that if someone at the moment can so boldly and with so much certainty proclaim their love for someone else, but in the next moment become so cold and distant to the person he claims he loves, then can we hold them responsible for their declaration of love but lack of action? Feelings change, after all. What we don’t realize is that we don’t know how long it might take for the feelings to change. A day, a few months or many years later. I guess mine just took a couple of weeks and here I am, scurrying through all these podcasts, trying to find comfort, reason and the science behind people saying things that might be their truth in that particular moment but completely going the opposite way and losing these feelings in what feels like a snap of a finger. And what I’m slowly coming to realize, as cliche as that sounds is that words, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs are all mostly temporal and they’re subjected to change. I cannot consistently blame the other person for confessing his feelings for me at that moment but then suddenly switching off. There’s a feeling of betrayal I guess and maybe that’s where the anger stems from. But the comfort from this podcast highlights that the irrationality, illogical sense of the mind mostly triggered due to the fear of uncertainty causes us to say and do things for ourselves without much consideration of the consequences in the future.
It’s a lot to take in and pretty much something that’s hard for me to swallow because for a while I kept holding people responsible and accountable for their words. But in true fact, we often say things in “the heat of the moment” and not recognizing that perhaps they will hold so much weight to someone else. The dealing of this small death of a friendship is excruciatingly painful because I never thought this day would come. But through the year, I’m slowly coming to realize that I’ve been seening people through rose-coloured glasses and it’s about time to take them off to see them for what they are.
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