Photo by Procsilas

It seems an especially difficult thing to love everyone, as some people might.  In my understanding of love, there would be no desire to change the thing that you love if you truly loved for what it was.  So if one were to love everyone, the problem I’m about to describe wouldn’t apply.  The problem is that people are so complex that it is impossible to find a person that could be deemed perfect in the eyes of anyone.  There are so many different sides to a person, that even someone we deeply respected or admired might have a side to them that would be unappealing to us.

As I see it, there are initially three possible attitudes we could adopt in our view of others.  We could choose to like everyone, dislike everyone, or be indifferent to them.  Each of these must be applied to everyone, because choosing to like or dislike only certain people would be to suggest that there is some level of perfection, or some level of inexcusable faults.  Also, if we were to choose only certain people, then everyone would choose different sets of people.  Even the person we might most despise would be liked by someone.  In this case we don’t approach any conclusive decision about the population because our own liking or disliking would be meaningless.

The problem I see with loving everybody is that if we really were to love everybody and accept people as they are, then we would not be right in trying to change them.  This creates a conflict because everyone holds certain values to be important, if we loved everyone, we would love even the people that embodied the opposite of our values.  If we are to accept everyone, then why hold our own values to be important at all?  If we are accepting of everything and do not seek to change anyone, why speak of such values at all?  Of course this is under the assumption I have made that loving entails unconditional acceptance.  This may not be true for others’ view of love.

So I decide to choose between like, dislike, and indifference.  This also became quite perplexing as I would waver between the three of these over the course of the last couple of years, depending on different experiences with people.  I still feel there must be some way to resolve this inconsistency.  I don’t think we can be indifferent completely because nobody is born indifferent.  People are driven to indifference through negative experience, and just the fact that this experience affects us defeats the purpose of indifference.  We are left with dislike and like.  Every person I know has sides that I like and sides that I dislike, so it’s hard to write anyone off to completely dislike or choose anyone to completely like.  My solution has become to like or dislike based on the sides within each person.  This way, there is someone to like in everyone, and someone to dislike.  This view also leaves room for change.  I can still hold my values and desire change based on those values in the sides that I dislike.  Right now, this is the best balance I can strike between complete liking, which I feel excuses too much, or complete dislike, which is too harsh.

This view is very much something I thought of recently, so I would be very interested to hear your own solutions or opinions so I can improve this idea or see the faults in it.

Photo by Hamed Masoumi

According to research by economists and psychologists, the level of happiness in the population has not changed in almost a century.  In spite of advances in medicine and technology, we are not happier than our ancestors.  Characteristics such as age, gender, income level, and health, do not account for a lot of the variance in happiness between people.  This kind of evidence inevitably leads to the question of why this things that have seemingly improved our lives so much, have not really increased how happy we feel.  It’s important to note first that happiness in these studies was determined by the responses of the subjects themselves.

The first thought I have is that if all these improvements going on externally are not impacting our perceived happiness, then maybe the next step is to go inward.  People tend to rate their happiness based on how much they have externally, so they are in a constant state of wanting more.  I think it is this condition that has persisted over the century studied.  I’ve felt this desire in myself as well.  As soon as a desired improvement, the next step externally, is achieved, we immediately think of something else we have to have.  There are always going to be a million things we don’t have, and this is why this type of thinking will never lead us to feeling happier.  In fact, it is this greed itself that prevents the subjects in these studies from rating themselves the maximum level of “happiness”.  If we always think we have to have more, then even when asked if we are happy, we’ll think “well I could be happier.”  This is why income level was not a good predictor.  The billionaires and the unemployed all want more.

The second thought is that most people’s definition of happiness tends to coincide more with pleasure than contentment or peace.  True happiness either is or is not, there is no “happier”.  So if we are to seek this peace within ourselves, then it is not going to come in the form of a new phone or a more convenient washing machine.  We must go within and sort out the conflicts within ourselves if we want satisfaction.  But none of this can even begin to happen if we first don’t realize our blind rush for “more”.  It’s not going to happen if we don’t realize that we are seeking pleasure, not peace.

In life, it seems that there are very few other things that could compare to the importance of “love.”   I put this in quotes because I feel like most people who use this word haven’t really thought of what it really means to them.  The idea they have is based on what they were told as children, what they saw in movies and TV, what they read in books.  Maybe it’s just me, but I believe that we should all have our own understanding of the things we consider important and not be content with what has already been put in our heads.

The word “love” is almost dangerous to use now because of the numerous connotations that it has attached to it.  This creates misunderstandings and hurt feelings, as demonstrated by enough relationships around us.  The first question we have to ask is if there is such a thing as an objective “love” out there that should be the ideal.  This of course is something you have to think out and decide for yourself.

Even before we start to create our own beliefs, if we examine what people call “love”, it is full of contradictions.  We say love is selfless but we practice selfishness with our loved ones.  We say love is forgiving but we harbor grudges.  My favorite is “if you love someone, set them free,” but everyone wants to hold on and get angry when it’s taken away.  Even the thing that most people think “love” is seems completely contradictory.  It seems sad that we aren’t able to live up to our own expectations of what it is.

I’m not saying I have the answer about what it is or should be.  I only think that it’s time to start questioning ourselves and our belief about what it is.  If we are going to have this thing in the top priorities of our lives, it should at least be worth some reflection.  Believe in something because you thought it, not because you were told it.