Dancing with Shadows: The Illusion of Social Life

I’m sitting across from Andrew at a Sheffield cafe. Urban trinkets are twinkling on post-industrial white-washed walls, but his eyes are not. Something has passed my lips that has transformed his energetic demeanour on a dime. “You know” he softly bemoans “there are healthier ways…” his voice tapers off, and though the space between unchanged, he appears at a distance. His eyes water the paintwork. “What’s done is done.” I quip defiantly. “I can’t undo it.” A passing barista awkwardly adjusts the mood. “Why didn’t you just read the texts?” he says a second later, with a note of desperation. I elaborate. “I always knew something was off.” “Oh, it didn’t feel so obvious five minutes ago” I retort, but the cascade of thoughts swirling through his mind is damage enough, and friends no more we were.

How can a single sentence pierce a person's heart? How do we set ourselves up to fall? Why do I feel alone regardless of closeness or count of friends? Have you ever received a Christmas present that made you think “They tried their best” but left you feeling flat? Last year, a cousin gave me a book on “secular” Buddhism. Nevermind that I had never been a Buddhist nor had I adapted to become a “secular” one. It was not for want of talk either. I had spent plenty of time discussing my views. No, it stems from a misalignment far deeper and far more alarming. 

Think about the very first time you met a close or best friend. Choose an example where you didn’t meet them online or receive any forewarning. At a party let's say. Introductions are usually learnt and not spontaneous. As are the accompanying wooden formalities, but once the standard fare is wrung out, then the magic begins. The almost necessary half-awkward half-innocent half-bargaining dance of personality that, by some gracious mystery of the cosmos, either leads to a sparkling evening with many sparkling drinks or a quick fizzle and a reassuring hot choc by the telly. That first contact is an establishing moment, formative, like planting a flag in undiscovered land —the claiming and integration of the great unknown.

But we all know the trajectory thereafter. That fluid, alive and exhilarating back and forth excitement wanes. Leaving us with a collection of self-fulfilling programs in our heads specifically tailored to each friend. I go to this person to discuss relationships. This one for advice. This one for humour. This one for serious business. And what was once an unconscious and unceremoniously fun get together turns into an extraction process. Here’s a bit of dopamine for you, because you gave me mine. Here’s what I know you like to hear because you tickled me the right way. We start to know each other so well that our knowing blocks each other's true colours; worse we begin to conform to each other’s role. Such that, through numbing repetition, the trench in my mind that represents you gets worn deeper to accommodate you and the mountain in yours rises to fit snuggly with my trench. But each time we go through the motions it feels a little more fake, a little less genuine and a whole lot duller. 

How does this happen? To pin it down more succinctly, what begins to happen is that our minds subconsciously box aspects of someone's personality in time, for ease of convenience and social safety. We are wired for certainty, energy conservation and to please others to maintain social status. A survival mechanism from our hunter-gatherer history. Not knowing how someone behaves is exhausting and a liability for you and the tribe. The same applies today, such that if someone acts unexpectedly we say “Are you feeling alright?” with only half-sarcasm. It is most stultifying in the parent-child relationship, whereby a child is slowly conditioned to become the parents' vision, as is most visible with many sports stars. Image is everything.

As a result of building this conceptual strawman, we end up speaking to our own conception, rather than the alive and enigmatic reality. Anything spoken gets filtered into what we already believe about them, and the ambiguous meanings taped shut. Confirmation bias grooms you further and we see the halo or horn effect take shape. Their energetic essence is killed with knowledge. So when a person really does something "abnormal" the shock is tantamount to a betrayal. How could our lovely middle class well mannered boy do that? Perhaps he is more than you thought he was? Everyone is. Thought can’t capture a smidgen of the ever-flowing tapestries of human character. Thought is sluggish and updates like molasses, which causes conceptual lag. This is why your parents still think you're in the emo phase. Life is instant, always fresh and different. Take a look at the popular turn of phrase “people never change” and realise that they don’t change because they are not expected to. And we conform to what we are expected. Even if we do change, the change is typically overlooked because we can barely see through our outdated conceptions —we explain their every move with these. “This act of ‘kindness’ is just him trying to manipulative me.” “Yeah, she’s off travelling again, running away from her problems, you know Sarah.” There’s hardly room for the possibility that they really changed.

Fundamentally it is vastly easier to resort to and explain someone's behaviours with our ideas. How can I float through my tedious day job if I am fully present and available for everyone I work with as if I were meeting them for the first time? We do the former every day and it works. The brain has been designed for excellent pattern recognition, but it's far from perfect. It contributes to a feeling of loneliness, this abstract distancing; you never feel one with the object of attention.

But how can I interact with so and so if he isn’t this? And what about me? If I’m not an athlete or an altruist or a good husband then who am I? Good question. Can you handle not knowing? Did you know who you were when you came out of the womb? Is this where the aliveness of our true nature hides? In the space between all ideas?