The Absolute Need For Relationships
Hey!
I’m writing this one from Poland. I barely speak the language, and after a number of months, the lack of real life connection is starting to take its toll.
I have business conversations daily, but it doesn’t replace face-to-face interactions.
I’m out here for family reasons, and didn’t plan to be away for so long. As soon as some admin things are taken care of, I’ll be temporarily back to my country and catching up with clients and friends.
I was chatting with my best friend about it the other night. He’s also spent time overseas without real world relationships and found it a lonely existence.
With brings me to the point, demonstrated with a question:
“If you were the only human in the universe, would you even know you’re human?”
It’s a good question. I think the answer is, probably not.
And if so, we can infer that we aren’t ‘human’ without relationships.
It’s our relationships that ‘bring us to life.’
Which is really cool, and really not what we focus on in the world. With our days taken up by screens; from spreadsheets to scrolling to streaming, we’ve swallowed up time with digital experiences in place of real world friendships.
And frankly, our ‘selves’ aren’t ‘us’, they are what we give our attention to.
In years gone by, we gave our attention to others. To our friends and family, brothers and sisters, co-workers and other humans we meet on our paths. We prioritised people over pixels.
This grounding in physical reality gave experiences weight, which made them meaningful to us.
I touched on this in my last newsletter. My best friend and I were joking about a Nokia mobile phone we had in the very early 2000’s, which had an in-built radio and the ability to add up to thirty songs. But to get the songs onto the phone, you had to connect it to a CD player and play the song whilst recording it on the phone. And so the whole song selection and song transfer became its own thing in its own right.
We had to think about what songs we wanted, and in what order we wanted them in. That took thinking, discussion and debate. If a song made the cut, it made a statement. It said something about our preferences. Announcing our selection was its own experience.
And then we’d play them, endlessly. We’d play them on holidays. We’d play them when visiting each other. We’d play them at night when we should have been sleeping. Each song became something to us. All of those experiences were rendered in reality.
We just don’t get the same experience today. We get an infinite selection and no marriage to moments. We skip the ritual that makes the music magical. We no longer give our attention to it. Contrast before; where we gave attention to the selection process, to the friendship, to the art of listening; with now; where we skip the induction process and doom scroll instead of deliberate.
I can swap this story with countless others.
And you might ask me, ‘what has this got to do with relationships?’
Everything. Attention is relationship. It’s the tether to the things we're relating to.
If our attention isn’t here, it’s there. And in today’s world, ‘there’ can be everywhere and nowhere all at once.
I mean, do you remember anything from your last scrolling session? When you had music on in the background, and a show playing on another screen? Was any of it meaningful? Was being in relationship with digital distraction worth the cost? The cost of real relationships to real things in the real world?
When was the last time you spoke to someone that’s not your partner?
Really speak to them? Not performatively. And not at the edges. But in the belly of the beast, getting right down to the important things, bearing your chest and all?
I’m willing to wager that for the majority of us, it’s hard to place a date on it.
Which is why it all feels ephemeral and fleeting.
Because we’ve lost the anchors to our arrival. The grounded moments that make it all meaningful.
And so I urge us all to get it back.
To roll around in the absolute need for relationships.
To find the 30 songs that matter and to carefully and considerately load them onto our awareness devices, and ditch the doom scroll and track changes for carefully created and crafted experiences.
That sounds better, doesn’t it?