Thoughts
I just finished binging the first 5 episodes of *Ted Lasso*. It’s so fricking good. I nearly cried.
I need to stop using this website like a personal journal, but whatever, here we go.
I tend to conflate manipulating or impressing someone into liking me with loving them. This seems weird now that I realize that. When I say love, I mean of course a Biblical, self-sacrificial, love.
*Ted Lasso* (TL) does a phenomenal job showing what it looks like to love someone, and for them to see that and to like you back.
Ted gets to know someone, and then gives them what they need. (This is where the show is a comedy, see, because Ted is freakishly good at this, and the people are never ready for it.)
I’m a very ends oriented person. Even if you say something like “love someone,” I ask, what does that mean? Loving someone is a means, a verb, not an end. I’ve asked people, years ago, pastors, “how do I love someone” and I got told that it’s doing nice thing for them or whatever. But I hear also, you should give anonymously and you can make a lot of money in CS. So one of my life’s goals is to commit a lot of time up front to making money, so that I can then donate it to charity. I fixated on the end of “helping people” and decided that the most efficient person-helped-per-hour strategy was to become a philanthropist.
Of course, this was me as a child. I knew I was missing something. I figured out that I was missing friends, around 11th grade, and fixated on “friends” as the end. I was class president 12th grade. Everyone knew me. And it worked, right. I legitimately had more friends.
(People get all worked up about “doing things for the right reasons.” One of my most controversial beliefs is that that’s BS. I’m ends oriented. If you donate $x to a church for your own self-esteem, your own image, you’ve done 2 things. You’ve committed a sin of pride, and you’ve made a charitable gift. One good thing, one bad thing. The good thing doesn’t go away, the charity still gets their money.)
When I focused on getting friends, I got friends. But I was asking myself, “what can I do to get them to like me?”
The key is to ask the other person about themselves first. To *understand them*.
I fricking love understanding things. I don’t know why the idea of understanding people hasn’t come to me before. I’m normally like, I need to understand this person so that I can best make comments to get them to like me. Or, even more often, I need to understand humans so that humanity will like me. (When I say “like” here, btw, I mean a respect, regard, “think I’m a good person.” Not just “think I’m enjoyable to be around”, although that is included.)
Ted tries to understand people first, then help them. I think I was skipping that. I’m a good listener, because I want to be nice and listening is a way to do that, but I never thought of listening in order to help someone.
I have an anxiety, a phobia, of appearing presumptuous. I don’t want to assume people need my help. My solution should be to listen to their problems. But for some reason my solution to that was to make sure they had the ability to help themselves and then get out of the way. That’s the philanthropist philosophy.
**I guess what I’m saying is that I always thought love was one step—help people. And it’s really 2 steps–understand people, then use that understanding to help them.**
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to think about this.
I think about Buddy the elf. He “loves” people. He tries to do things for them constantly. But he doesn’t know what the heck is going on so he ends up making things worse. I hate that so much. I’m ends oriented. Buddy misses the understanding part, the listening part.
Because sometimes people need you to hold their hand, and sometimes people need you to give them tools and leave. But that’s different for the person and the situation, and you have to understand someone first before you can know which.
[X] Understand someone -> act such that they like me
[X] Do things for people without understanding them -> make things worse
[Checkmark] Understand people -> do something for them -> they like me