The entire survival of a human being is mostly dependent on the ability to communicate and adapt to other people, and mental well-being is partly subordinated to the interactions with other people and their feedback. Most people have an innate desire to feel loved, cherished, understood appreciated by a certain group, but, unfortunately, these needs often cannot find a proper satisfaction throughout life, and that results in the mental destabilization of inner well-being. Whan one seeks in others and it often does not correlate to what one frenquently gets from them.
In mass media, relationships, no matter what kind of they are, between people are often presented only from the positive, bright side of a thing, disregarding the heinous foundation and the ulterior motives that underlie them. A happy family having a good time, a sweet couple going on dates, the friends giving a helping hand — these ubiquitous representations of common types of interactions are the main themes of advertisements, books, movies, music sell well and everlastingly profit to their exploiters with the help of these appealing, cheesy images. No wonder, so many people buy into this and unquestioningly assume that these kinds of relationships will assuredly bring them genuine happiness and prosperity, but it is extremely rare that some suspect tremendous pitfalls in these tenuous affairs.
The existence of a human being starts in a group of people who intentionally or unintentionally begot him into this world and are called parents. The very idea of reproduction implies a complete egoistic desire of some two individuals, who were previously strangers with each other, to create another one, in accordance with their conscious or unconscious whims, to continue the legacy and subordinate someone to them, and so on. Of course, they could object that their intentions were wholly unselfish and disinterested — just to give another being a chance to experience a life that is full of miracles and adventures, to endow a life journey full of happiness and joy. But let’s penetrate the walls of sugarcoating assurances, and one will clearly notice that behind these sweet and voluptuous words lies the key moment in their purely selfish desire to foist a life on someone, but not the very desire of a receiver to wish for and gratuitously accept it. Therefore, every child is mecilessly pushed into this world without his permission and definitely against his will to be controlled and toyed by the rules of parents or caregivers, like a rag puppet doll.
There is no 100% guarantee of someone’s happy and carefree existence, but there is always a guarantee that a child will most likely not be fond of his life experience due to the malevolent essence of life itself, granting the gifts of sufferings almost every second with its needs that are required to be satisfied in order to stay on the float of sanity. It is absolutely impossible to remain happy all the time; for happiness is just the satisfaction of needs that arise intermittently during the lifetime and may leave an individual devastated, if they are not satisfied in full.
Let’s continue further the examination of implicit nature of familial relationships. As one could see, parents created a child merely in order to benefit off him; it does not matter what kind of benefit it is, e.g. emotional, physical, labor, assistance and etc. The pivotal point consists in involuntary enslavement of a child by parents; the first was entagled in these kind of relationships, not to mention the world, non-consensually, literally as entertainment, a living tool to satisfy the whims, requires, caprices of its owners.
It is true that parenthood is, first of all, a hobby for those who seek to acquire meaning in life, fill in the existential void, kill boredom and time, have a retirement plain in hand. Most of these points seem extremely advantageous for individuals that have decided to start playing the family game and involve the third party to play it, ignoring its initial absense of desire to come into existence; that is, the newcomer is now not only a hostage of the biological shell, but a pliable puppet of his parents. Commonly, parents impose their unfulfilled dreams, wishes on children, and this imposition results in mental and physical indisposition of the latter, who do not want to be shackled by someone else’s farcical rulings.
It is not difficult to notice the sheer egocentrism of parental intentions and embellishment of toxic demeanor with cheesy names of love, compassion, selflessness and kindness; these are completely inapropriate concepts when there is a constant coercion to act in accordance with expectations of other members of family, which often turn out unfulfilled. The inability to meet the expectations of family members frequently translates into rampant conflicts, quarrels, cusses, which brings nothing, but supefluous suffering to the subjects of accusation and initiators of the squabble.
Thus, a family unit is a normalized imprisonment wherein each individual is involved in liability ties with others in order to assuredly acquire something profitable from them. Besides, the prison-like qualities are vividly expressed in the desire of a couple to produce a new creature and have it as a part of the family; surely, a child does not have a consent to be born or not to these people. Needless to say, a child unwillingly becomes enslaved to his caregivers in all manners until he is completely able to be mentally and physically separated from them and to provide for himself. The child is forced to be subjugated to their training, manipulation, indoctrination, reproaches, which, undoubtedly, greatly affect the development of character, views, beliefs and the further life path of the child.
The next step of socialization takes place in various institutions, associations, conglomerations of people, such as kindergarten, school, college, job, interest clubs and etc. An individual meets people there and enters into either long-term or short-term contacts with them. Most contacts, of course, represent a short-term character and frequently never turns into a strong, durable social framework. The reason behind short-term relationships is that the social nature is firmly based on the implicit concept of receiving benefits from another, i.e something that satisfies one’s seflish desires.
There is not a single deed that is completely devoid of egoism and selfishness in a human; from a distance, some actions of a person could definitely be perceived as if they are free of ego, altruistically motivated, but what lies beneath it is only HIS desire to act upon it, translate HIS intentions into practice to eliminate someone’s afflictions and hardships. Thus, most interactions with people are one-sided and brief, do not lead to the strong, long-term ties between them – one or both sides frequently do not see a further retrieval of advantages from the other. Long-term relations often presuppose that two parties have implicitly agreed on gaining benefits from each other as long as everything is in a mutual regard; hence, they stay in contact with each other and mantain the communication. When the prospect of profit is no longer visible, one or the other party readily breaks off the connection.
Thus, every interaction that occurs between individuals is a purely ego-driven mechanism aimed on the attaining something from someone. The least egoistical person must be the most solitary and unsociable by nature, as he does not impose his will and desires onto someone and independently resolves the emerging impediments on his life path.
Most of interactions are predominantly imposed and compelled due to life circumstances that one inevitably has to face during the period of one’s existence. From the very beginning of kindergarten, through school, college and work, one is forced to communicate with a group of people who are, at first, completely unfamiliar and unwillingly brought together by fate with one; that is, interaction with them is ineluctable in order to gain something from them that is necessary to advance further in the assigned objectives. The prerequisites of strangeness and tension of social constraints, confinement with random people of different characters, whom one had no disposition to choose, often poured out and manifest in such poisonous, fierce actions as bullying, quarrels, scuffles, and, sometimes, it reaches the apogee of violence and turns into overt physical fights, scuffles; not to mention about the delicate methods by which people force suffering on each other with sophisticated manipulations, mind games, and passive-aggressiveness.
The aforementioned traits are completely unavoidable elements of human communication, even in the short-term manner. Whenever any number of sides clashes with one another because of difference, disharmony, dissatisfaction with interests, agendas, requirements and expected results, conflict is an almost inevitable part of confrontation; there is only way to evade this is not to engage in social affairs at all, or at least try to minimize the general negative impressions by cutting off the unfavorable ties.
The stable bond in which two parties agree to participate in a reciprocally beneficial relationship is called friendship. The chief tenets of acquiring benefits are still the same as in other relations: one seeks in the other a means of satisfaction of one’s needs. From the very beginning of human history, so many lies have been fabricated about this phenomenon: a friend will never betray, friends forever, the unconditional foundation of friendship. In fact, a person is a friend to another, if the former or the latter shares his interests, goals, philosophical aspects and other common grounds; and when that person no longer correspond to the the expectations of representational model of someone in the mind of the other, the friendship gradually or abruptly ends. It is extremely rarely to find a person who is still in contact with his friends more than a decade. Thus, most of people come and go, like swift frames of a film, and seldom remain in anyone’s life. That is, every individual is easily replaceable by nature, although some full coincidence of traits cannot be entirely found in another one, still there are a multitude of potential candidates for this role of a prospect friend that could have similar feautues of character, appearance, mannerisms.
Exactly the identical principles apply to romantic and sexual relationships. Everyone unwittingly sees in the other side a commodity, a way to gratify one’s desires. The whole sexual instinct is based on that selfish urge to possess another, to have a dominance over someone, to pour out sentiments and get something in return. Furthermore, when that desire is not satisfied, it leads to the greater extent extreme, violent intentions and motives. There is not a single case of murdering a beloved one in unrequited love, commiting suicide due to unrequited love, thirsting for revenge for infidelity and resulting lifelong trauma from these malicious deeds. Love is a blind and totally chemistry-induced process, independent from the will and does not appertain to rational, logical thinking, since this group of feelings is associated with crude, raw forces that are installed in ancient areas of the brain, the most powerful and great influences in human behaviour. Many people, even the most intellectually cultivated, take these natural impulses at face value, excessively dazzled by the tempting prospects of foreboding happiness and joy, not considering the source and the reason of such an insidious feeling; this reason is exceptionally prosaic and obvious — the body’s need to reproduce another bodies. But many of them earnestly wish to embellish and decorate it with pleasant narratives and mythical stories about its integral metaphysical part. Thus, the seed of suffering is perpetually sown by a multitude of generations over and over, again and again, in the hope that love will bring them something more than piles of corpses, dissapointment, and consternation.
Substantial objections may arise from aforementioned inferences that there is not only suffering and dissonance in interpersonal relationships, but a multifarious variety of pleasant emotions, mutual understanding, chemistry between people. This could be so, but this assumption does not negate the fact there are more neutral and negative moments than there are truly genuine and positive ones, that human relationships are based on egoistical, self-indulging motives, and these actions and aspirations to retrieve something may sometimes inadvertently hurt the other person and leave him wrecked and broken for the rest of his life.
Thus, in most cases, human relationships are transactional, reciprocal in essence: the first party expects to receive something from the second party, and the second party wants something in return from the first party; and these cases are not devoid of an initial desire to satisfy the self. However, there are scenarios in which the parasitic egoism is mostly vividly expressed in interactions, when one gets little or nothing from the other, and the other takes advantage of the compliance of one, parasitizes this person; these types of relationship oftentimes last until the suppressed takes the hold of situation and break off the unfavorable ties.
Nowadays, with the advent of the Internet, hook-up culture, hustle culture, human relationships have become more superficial and transient; thereby, the shortness of relationships has been tremendously magnified, and people have become more isolated and lonely from each other, taking into consideration the constant emergence of new connections and communications.
On the one hand, any interaction with people is fraught with a certain degree of toxicity and intolerance on both sides, nevertheless the positive outcomes it concludes; and it is the most preferable solution — to retreat into serene solitude without further social obligations. On the other hand, a human being cannot live comfortably without the help of the other similar beings and is compelled to interact with others to make them furnish the possibility to achieve his needs and desires. Thus, the middle ground may be found in upholding a secluded lifestyle with the inclusion of soft companionship without strong bonds and dependencies.
As far as one can see, it is difficult to find suitable people who will be able to conduct this communicational exchange in a fair and symbiotic manner with full correlation of interests, philosophies and traits of characters. Each interaction is implied to have an influence on the members of that interaction: one or more parties impose their thoughts on each other; and this imposition frequently turns into assimilation and absorption of other people’s ideas; and these ideas may eventually become the stable system of mindset, behavior, values. Consequently, the dictated systems are not equally befitting and benevolent for all, but contain the implicit vitriolic motives that are aimed at indoctrination and brainwashing and further malicious control over a person. The more distant from the world an individual is, the more uncommon his views and occupations are, the less he will be capable to communicate with the other individuals who will not correspond to him on common grounds.
Relationship games in which people eagerly take part in are never suppossed to be won by either side. It is impossible to win something that has already been designed to fail. There are few examples of minuscule quantities of relationships in which individuals settle down and stay in touch for a long time; most of these ties are founded on habitual familiarity, acceptance of one’s flaws, reluctance to find another companion. Oftentimes, people exploit each other, like disposable plastic cups, for a short period of time and throw themselves in a trash bin in case of discrepancy of interests. Not to mention the time limitation set by the duration of a person’s life — all relationships terminate in the same direction: either one party cuts the social contacts with the other party, or one of the parties dies.
Voxvacui 