Essay 7: Connection

Essay 7: Connection

I was something of a loner growing up. Those who knew me would say that was because I lived in my head. I always thought quickly, so much so that my mouth could not keep up and I stuttered constantly as a result. The fact that I had such a vivid imagination made being alone more entertaining than other people who simply did not like what I liked. Those of you who bought that line of reasoning will find great utility for this essay because that was not the core reason at all. The reason why I was alone was because I did not want to be. Simple as that. Underlyingly I wanted to form a bond with others, make friends, and have a group that loved my presence, but I could not trust that people gave a crap about me. The idea of being caught in a relationship where I thought of them constantly but they viewed being nice to me as being polite hurt too bad, so I never tried. I buried my desire to make friends under constant brainstorming, story creation, and learning; holding onto my daydreaming sessions for dear life like a raft in the ocean. Eventually, it has been so long since I fed my desire for a relationship of any kind that I forgot it existed; I was starved for so long that it became the new normal. It was not until I was almost 17 that my mom asked me “Doesn’t it hurt?” when referring to my lack of friends or relationships and I finally broke down crying. The truth is there was never a time when it did not hurt, rarely a night when I was not either painfully aware of how alone I was or distracting myself from that fact, I just buried my head in the sand before I spiraled. Why did it hurt so badly? Not having people means they cannot hurt me or mess up my plans, meaning certainty was happy. I could entertain myself just fine with my imagination, family, anime, or YouTube to the point that I was never really bored, so uncertainty did not do it. This is the result of connection, the next of the needs that all of us have, and I want to take the opportunity in this essay to properly define it. I will do so by first detailing when we first become aware of other people early in life, then defining connection, and finally discussing my theory on what its mechanism really is structurally and how that pertains to my use of key terms in this book.

There is some debate regarding when we become aware of the existence of other people as sentient beings, but the consensus among researchers of theory of mind development seems to be that it is an individual process that is influenced by the infant/child’s surroundings and the expression of which happens gradually. Theory of mind in this context refers to a field of research that seeks to understand the development of two types of awareness in humans. The first is that the subjective experience of the world that defines our “self” is something others experience as well. The second is that the objective body that we see others as is something we have too. Using this book's terminology, a theory of mind is when we assign the things we call other people the attributes of having their own needs, state-of-things, and stories or conversely when we assign ourselves the attribute of having a physical, objective body. While some theorize the baseline of a theory of mind understanding even begins at birth, it is difficult to tell since babies cannot communicate. The basis for this claim is that human faces and voices are the best way to capture a three-month-old's attention. There is also an indication that they can coordinate basic actions, sounds, and faces with others, indicating an existing level of sociability even at that age. Then, starting at six months or later, depending on the person, babies are often able to play with others. They can participate in certain turn-taking games, form opinions on objects depending on other people’s shown emotions related to them, change the way they interact with an object through imitation, and even attempt to direct the attention of others. Of course, this is far from the level of understanding any of you reading this would have of other people, but one could argue, and some do, that this is a baseline level of understanding, even if it cannot be conceptualized until much later. At two years old, many toddlers demonstrate an understanding that other “people will feel happy if they get what they want and will feel sad if they do not.” Furthermore, toddlers begin to understand at that age that other people could want things that are different from what they want. At three years old, this gets taken another step further as they now understand that others have knowledge. This gets further developed by age four when children are now aware of others having a state of things that may not be reflective of their own. What do I mean by this? Imagine a child opens a box that they always believed was a cookie jar only to realize he was tricked and there is actually paintbrushes in the box. If some other kid comes to open the box the four year old would be cognizant of the fact that they were both led to believe that there were cookies but were tricked and thus the other kid is likely approaching the situation believing there are cooking in the box. A three year old believes that since he knows there are no cookies, every one else knows that, and would wonder why the other kid would even bother opening the box. Of course this is not the end of theory of mind development; we continue to become more empathetic and aware of others as we mature. This is all to say that while “awareness of the existence of other people” is something we conceptually always knew on some level, even as babies, how aware we are of others continues to evolve over time. This development of our awareness is not automatic though, we garner this understanding through life experience and our actions. Every interaction with someone else leads to some shift in the story that we call other people, and those shifts are incentivized because on some level we want to understand others. Why is that?

This earlier point raises the most difficult-to-answer question of this essay, what is connection? More specifically, what do we seek in other people that cannot be accounted for in one of the other needs? The other five feel fairly exhaustive on a material outcome basis so connection is thus hard to make sense of. Fundamentally all needs are parts of ourselves that need to be satiated and they are all entirely mutually exclusive from one another in scope. So what do we seek in others that cannot be accounted for with our other needs? I will not run through my full thought process as it involves an understanding of other needs I have barely defined up until this point but the short answer is that connection is the need to share a language with others. Note, that this is a bolded word (a key term), so disregard what you think language means and listen closely.

What is your favorite main character in fiction? Think about who they are and remember their introduction, their experiences, their emotional highs, and your experience witnessing them. Keep those moments in mind for the rest of this essay, and everything I say, convert it in your mind to the equivalent of your answer. When my favorite main character was introduced there was an opening image; an action or monologue of some kind that shows his headspace and where he is in life. Soon after, I saw him make a few observations, and not too long after another person came on screen and I saw how he interacted with that person. Over the course of the story, I saw him process events, deal with people, take action, deal with problems, get betrayed, have fun, and lose friends; all the while I experienced every second of it right there with him. When you experience those events with said main character, there cannot be any confusion when the story refers back to it. When the main character suddenly got sentimental remembering his lost friend, I cried right there with him because I was there when he lost his friend. When the main character showed regret in how he treated someone who loved him long ago, I got frustrated along with him because I saw him treat her like that. When he grew beyond who he was for the longest time in a moment of realization after all the suffering of the preceding scenes, I grew with him because I experienced those events alongside him. Even someone I know in real life can reference a scene and I will immediately know what he is talking about. 

What does this have to do with language? A language is a set of stories, and thus to “share a language” with someone is to share a set of stories with them. The main character is a mechanism to do exactly that; I experienced his stories alongside him and thus we share a language. Main characters are not people, they are languages. I will use the term shared language to refer to a shared set of stories. To read a fictional tale is to develop a shared language with the author if no one else. A cool mechanism of this is that if I met someone else who experienced that same fictional tale, we now, in some rudimentary way, have a shared language right off the bat. We experienced the same set of interactions and thus have some shared understanding that we can use as an anchor to build a relationship. Fictional tales are only one example though, every experience we share with someone develops a shared language. I have a friend that I went hiking with, laid outside at night in my underwear with, went to the same meetings with, and ran for our life to catch a flight with. Every one of those experiences is a story that we experienced together, and we can both point back to any one of them and remember the same events. These experiences built our shared language, which we embody and leverage in all of our interactions. We embody them in the form of inside jokes, talking about our shared stories, and making use of insights gained from those shared stories to more effectively relate our messaging to the other person in deeper conversation. One could say that our act of doing these stated things is us communicating with the shared language. Every person we have ever done anything with, we have a shared language with, and a good measure of how close people are is how comprehensive that shared language is. Relating all of this back to the point, I feel the creation and development of shared languages with others is a fundamental human need that lies outside the scope of the other five psychological and one physiological needs. Thus, shared languages are valuable for their own sake. There is nothing to further dissect and analyze, they are intrinsically and inherently valuable to every functioning human to ever live. 

A shared language can be best metaphorically exemplified as a world shared among those who use it. As I mentioned in a previous essay, a story is a series of interactions connected by a common reference point and at times intent. As a reminder, this means that if we have a story about an incident where we almost fell off a cliff while hiking with friends, the series of all interactions we remember for our entire life is restricted to what interactions are relevant to the specific situation that serves as the common reference point (“an incident where we almost fell off a cliff while hiking with friends”). If we tell the story, we also have to consider intents, which are the goals of how we tell the story. Are we trying to be concise? Make ourselves look better? Entertain? Be descriptive? Emphasize a point relevant to the context that prompted you to tell the story? A shared language consists of the stories you and someone else share, meaning that when the common reference point is stated, there is a mutual understanding built on the back of shared experience. Thus it is a shared world in part due to that shared understanding of the common reference point and the interactions that relate to it, and in other part because (and this is critical to understand) the story is not muddled by intent. You know what, intent is now a key term and means: the truncating and manipulating of the set of interactions that make up a story to that which best suits the goal of telling the story (whether to yourself or others). A shared language is built on uncorrupted, shared stories; only those who experienced the common reference point can speak about the experience in a shared language and conversely, all the experiences you share with others build a unique shared language that is inherently valuable. This statement is central to the purpose of A Snapshot of My Belief Structure.

Every person who reads this series will have had the experience of having done so. The shared experience among those people creates a shared language, which I am leveraging through the structure of my writing. Every bolded term is a key term, a universal that serves as a bone in the skeleton of my argument. What is more important than the argument though is the fact that I am using precise language to define each universal in a way that, hopefully, reduces any differences between your understanding of the term and what I intended the term to mean to a minimum. Any differences that remain can be further hammered out in Iron Sharpens Iron through regular communication to the point of ideal nonexistence. This creates a common language of words that we all have the same definition for, with this series serving as the dictionary for that shared lexicon, ideally eliminating the discovery phase of debates. What do I mean by the discovery phase? Every debate involves some level of expectation that the other person can read your mind. You assume their definitions of words are the same as yours (they are not), that their recollection of events is the same as yours (it is not), and that you are defining the premises of your argument in a completely exhaustive fashion (you are not). Thus a debate/argument begins when you or the other person makes a claim, and of course, the one hearing the claim will likely disagree with the phrase as it is worded. So the entire beginning of most debates is talking through each other, because even if you agree completely on substance that does not matter if you define words differently. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you figure out the other person’s argument as intended and start debating the substance after the fact but that is a relatively small percentage of the overall conversation and now you spent well over an hour on clarification for what could have been only a couple minutes of real debate. This is not only a time issue; the more differences there are in the definitions of the words we use and the way we construct arguments, the more our conclusions get corrupted. Even if we make the absolutely wild assumption that this corruption is minor in less sophisticated arguments, the second we use the conclusion of said “less sophisticated argument” as the premise in a more sophisticated argument, the effect compounds, limiting any ability to communicate higher order arguments. Thus I am leveraging the mechanism of a shared language to form a joint understanding of what words mean and how to construct arguments, preventing corruption and thus eventually allowing for clarity in higher-order discussion. 

That is all, see you all sometime by February 21 for Essay 8: Significance!