Those People Creatures, take two

really though, everyone is not different. They all seek out people that give them what they want or need. It's all selfishness.

Of course it is. Of course we are all selfish.

I am interested in what other people have decided it is that they need and seek out.

Because different people need different things in larger and smaller doses.

I think you're still going to find a lot of the same answers. People skew towards people that they find smart, funny, caring, that have a similar outlook on life, but might provide a different perspective to seeing that outlook. Maybe someone that will bust them on their bullshit to keep them in line.

My personal litmus test is if they are someone I would want to spend the night with, alone, during a terrible thunderstorm and all the power out. If they fit that bill, they could be a friend for life for me. But I've only really known like 3 or 4 people like that, because I hate people for the most part.

I know, for myself, I need physical contact. Hugs from friends, snuggles with my children and husband. My daughter Haily and I were just discussing this yesterday. (human touch) I think everyone needs it, but there are some who shy away from it. My son Jack is one of them. He doesnt shy away from it perse', but he is never the one to approach you for a hug. I have to give him the hug and he hugs back with a huge smile afterwards, but he does not approach me for one. Joe on the other hand will climb up in my lap, constantly wants his back scratched, feet rubbed and is just a total love bug. Haily is also a lover. Haily and I were discussing how we both like the human touch and need it, but dont understand why Jack likes it when he gets it, but is not one to seek it out. She has a male friend who is the same. We both said how terrible it would be if you never recieved touch. If you were a person who never had hugs or someone to love on you. So yeah I definitely need touch.
I also like when I have common interest with others and can discuss those things with them. Feed off of each others ideas and so on.
I like for people to be REAL with me, not fake and phony. I like people to be comfortable around me and be themselves. I dont want them to feel judgement from me. Im curious as to what makes them tick, no matter what that may be. This makes me think no less or more. Im drawn to people really who are their own person and totally comfortable with it. I find it refreshing, and love to have conversations with people like this. They are straight up with you, no qualms about it. I have only two friends like this. One of them is my Sister inlaw and her and my other girlfriend are the only women I consider my true friends. There is no bullshit with them. I never have to guess how they feel. They are very honest and open about their opinions and feelings, whether I like it or not, but I know I can go to them for the real deal. They live life for them, not what others think. I know Im attracted to these types of people, because it is who I am. Im not going to put on for no one. Accept me for me, because I accept you for you.
This is all I have for now. I LOVE this thread Pepper! I will be checking in often, because this is very interesting to me too. This is a great discussion topic. Me likes!

Cool topic. I have been thinking about this a lot, recently.

Sometimes, I think I am a bit of a friend-whore. I love making new friends. I am particularly drawn to upfront, perceptive individuals who can tell me something new about life and share their experiences. Quite often I find out that they're not really who I've built them up to be in my head but it doesn't really matter. Without sounding like a total hippy, I get a lot of pleasure from the journey in getting to know someone.

Thank you for the response winnie. That is along the lines of what I was looking for with this topic.

Nate, yes of course there will be a lot of similar answers. What I am asking about is that one type of connection that makes a person feel the most love and loved. That is required for their personal happiness. Everyone needs lots of things. For me of course I need hugs and of course I need to share experiences and of course I need people with similar interests and of course I need emotional connections, but the one thing I need most of all from other humans, that I feel completely isolated when I am not receiving, is mentally stimulating conversation. I don't mean to come off like I am smarter than others by saying this, I am probably pretty average with everyone here, I am sure there are smarter people than me here. But that is the thing that, most of all, makes me happy when I interact with other people.

Would you say then, that being able to connect with a wide spectrum of different types of people is something that your heart requires to feel full then?

As pathetic as it may sound, definitely.

I dont think that is pathetic Hattie, not at all. And the hippy thing of the journey of getting to know someone is great. I also like that journey. You put it in perfect terms.

No, I don't think that is pathetic either.

I'm a bad friend. I'm there to listen, I always help, I'm nice and kind, but I tend to "not refresh" friendships. I don't go out much, I don't even talk to my friends on a weekly basis, this is pretty much the only interaction I get aside from school and my family. It always feels like a waste of time, going out, socialising, spending a few hours in some place when I could be home reading or studying. It sounds horrible, and if I'd heard myself speak like this only a couple of years ago, I would've been terrified. But I am like this now. I don't know how I'll be in England, I hope it'll be better, maybe because there I was never afraid to go out baring a few inches of skin.
Anyway, when I do make friends, they need to be somewhat similar to me. Then again, I have several girl friends who I can't really relate to, so it's just inertia. I think it's intellect that draws me to people, I like having smart friends, even smarter than me, because then I try even harder to better myself. I like knowing people I can admire, like some of you, I like getting to know people from different cultures and backgrounds.

I'm pretty much the same as Irina.

Hattie is just like my mother.

There's something about me I can't define in that I don't really "let people in" (cliche, I know). I'm okay with it, though, because it's not so much that I can't, it's that I just don't want to. Never have, really. There are exceptions, of course - like Drew.

Socialization being an unavoidable thing, plagued with issues that hinder it, I find the best social interactions to be with people who have fucked up being around me so much, like so many missed notes in the past of a now practiced chelloist, that we are now in near perfect harmony, with just enough dissonance to keep things interesting.

This comes only by way of knowing somebody for a long time. The people who I could not get out of my life who I never asked to be in my life and who have, relentlessly, held what ground in my existence they inhabited.

My brother, for instance. He's five hours north, right now, installing an elevator, and I don't miss him at all and I don't think I've ever missed him. It would be inconvenient to miss a person. He'll work a twelve hour day tomorrow, he'll wake up at a hotel in which he barely ruffled the blankets and hardly touched the towels and then he'll go to his job site and plumb the rails and put in the doors and then he'll get his inspection checklist and go through it all, probably finding and fixing a problem with the wiring, and then he'll drive home for five hours straight without stopping once, and he'll send one text asking if we have beer which I will answer with yes, and then I'll ask his ETA and he'll tell me the exact minute, based on the flow of traffic, that he will arrive, and he won't be off a minute.

Then we'll get drunk and he'll complain about contractors and then he'll sleep and I'll walk home. He won't offer me money for a taxi and he won't feel bad that I have to walk an hour at 5am and if he did, that would annoy the piss out of me. He'll wake up the next morning, Saturday, at one of dawn's cracks and he'll get in his truck and go to Tim Hortons for a coffee. It probably won't be made right, so he'll throw it out, but he won't want to offend the person working at the coffee shop so he'll go to a different Tim Hortons and get another coffee, and maybe throw that one out to, and keep doing that until he gets one 'made right.'

Then, without having had breakfast, he'll smoke half of one regular sized cigarette, thinking self consciously about how he should quit, and he'll finish the coffee and go home and get on his motorcycle and drive to his shop to cut the grass with the riding lawn mower he bought cheap and fixed-- the grass he has to cut because he bought the shop as if only to cut the grass at it. He'll cut half the grass, exactly, and then he'll smoke half of his second cigarette and then he'll cut the other half. Then he'll look around. He'll probably grab something, a crate, and he'll put it somewhere else. Then he'll stare at it a minute and agree with himself that it should go there and then he'll drive back home.

He'll get home and he'll text me and say, "Should I pick you up?" and if I say no he won't ask why and if I say I'll walk he won't recommend anything else and if I say yes, he'll tell me the exact minute that he'll arrive and if he's late, even one minute, I'll walk back into the house and get back to reading because it'll mean something came up. Someone called him and he forgot what he was up to, and this can't annoy me because I can foresee it. If he's late one minute he'll be late at least an hour.

And when I get drunk and smash something, he'll be upset but he won't take it personally. He'll look at his accidentally smashed table as if a wind had knocked it over, not I; a natural force, rather, knowing that I am and have been reckless and will not change and cannot be contained, controlled, or convinced of anything on that front; but if I were to insult an old lady, even by accident, I would not have that immunity. It is wrong to break things and it's wrong to insult old ladies but it is not wrong for me to break things. It's still wrong that I insult an old lady and if I were to do so it would be a misstep of which he would have to rectify, being a moral person, and it would take a one or two or sometimes seven hour debate for him to relate to me the truth and virtue of being a morally astute person, and I will do the same to him. When he comes home from driving four hours and being stuck for two of them in downtown Toronto and you can see by his usual pleasant, now corrupt countenance, that he has a rant in his head. Like he does, he was building that rant about traffic and horrible people and how everything is stupid and it's in his head, ready to come out, and it's thought out and well-put and, despite that, it is wrong not even for humans to think like that, but wrong for him; an inexcusable wrong for him, and before he can get his rant off the ground I will stop him and tell him that his mood and only that is cause for the words coming out of his mouth, and that even he doesn't believe what he's saying and I can bring up examples, dozens, from the last twenty years, to convince him that he does not believe what he's saying and that all that's going on is that he had a bad day, and as an intelligent person capable of stupidity, he's trying to justify the bad of the day which can't be done, bad days happen, and by the tone of my voice talking over him, which I never do unless I'm right, he will all at once deflate and return to a normal state of mind and say, "Yeah yeah yeah," which he only says on those few occasions where he's wrong, and then it'll be over with.

And, other than that, you have to learn things from your social relations, otherwise they're useless. My brother has only ever been interested in working and in driving vehicles, but he knows how history began and what shapes it took over the centuries; he can quote Hemingway but doesn't know it's Hemingway; he knows all about the Greeks, about Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Schopenhauer and David Hume and even some Lacan; he can throw any blade into a wall, be it a fork a knife or a garden spade; he can nunchuck; he knows the distinctions, philosophically and technically, of a dozen or so martial arts, and all of this because of me; he would otherwise have known none of it, the same as I, if not for him, wouldn't know how to do drywall and hardwood flooring and plumbing and electrical work and how to drive without being an asshole and how to fix the most common car problems. We are in the habit of spending hundreds of hours to learn something, and then condenscing what we've learned into a one or two hour lesson and when one of us has something like this to teach, the other one shuts the fuck up and listens, because we connect on the mutual belief that all great work should be appreciated and that all knowledge is power.

I feel connected in silence. If you can share it with another person and enjoy it.

I like people who don't mind my stories about poop. And get that just because I'm not energetic and I talk about certain things I'm not sad or depressed.

Connections with others are good, but I think it's important first and foremost to be connected with yourself and to know who you are.

You're alright.

Hilla-rat, I agree about silence.

How does one go about knowing who they are? Every time you get close to a whole picture you will blindside yourself with something that makes need to start the whole learning process over again. At least this is my experience of being a human.

The thing the part about people who have fucked up around you is interesting.

I get very annoyed, at times. I have one long time friend who has fucked up so badly she tends to idolize me, and my lack of public (in front of her) fuck ups. It would be very nice if she would stop doing that. Someone taking a look and seeing how completely flawed you are and saying, ...Hey, I kinda like you better now... I think that might be a pleasant thing.

I wouldn't call it any more pleasant than when you learn yourself that you're fucked up, but it sure is fucking essential.

All of life on this planet is selfish. All matters of socialization have evolved around this. It's selfishness that causes people to develop morality. It's selfishness that causes us to judge others for lacking in that morality, particularly when they do it in a manner that's not in our favor. But it's also because of that selfishness that no matter how horrible a person is, it would be, to an extent, unnatural to reject them after you both have come to a deep and intimate understanding of each other, right down to predicting each other's actions and emotions.

Then again, there are psychopaths. Those people are as unpredictable to me as a bat's flight pattern. And that feeling isn't mutual. Some of them can predict my actions better than my own mother. Then again, I kinda keep her in the dark when it comes to the more "real" components of my character.

Lib, I just started reading Dawkins A Devils Chaplin -reflections on hope, lies, science and love the other day and what you said reminds of some things in the first essay, that the book is titled after.

Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent

There is no inconsistency in favoring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being ... For good Darwinian reasons, evolution gave us a brain capable of understanding its own provenance, of deploring the moral implications and fighting against them.

Exult even more that the clumsy and cruel algorithm of natural selection has generated a machine capable of internalizing the algorithm, setting up a model of itself-and much more-in microcosm inside the human skull

I've had these lines in my head for a week or more, have been contemplating them quite a bit.

I wonder if it the mirror of our own selfishness that causes an inability to fully reject someone once past a certain understanding, as well that same mirror that causes rejection before that point happens.

Nah, I think it's our innate need to connect with other human beings (for survival purposes), combined with the comfort of reliability that's a direct result of spending enough time with a person that their thought process becomes second nature to you, and yours to them (It's why ideas like "radical transparency" work in the business world). However, there is always an economic competition between what that person wants to know about you and what you want to know about them. Nobody wants to give too much away without getting as much as they can.

What the standard for morality sees as flaws in a person, you see as byproducts of a system only you can see. It's how I feel about most of the people I hang out with, all of them with their own crazy, unique story that you wouldn't expect if this design of morality was any kind of reflection of reality.

Silence screams the truth.

And yeah, life is definitely a constant learning process, and I am constantly re-learning who I am and changing BUT I know the core of who I am. Because I am always in a constant state of confusion, that is a part of me-part of a human. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the whole fleeting aspect of a person is a part of my identity and that I understand the 'essence' of myself. What I want my change, and my opinions may change but it never changes the "self".

You haven't said what thing makes you feel most connected, or most good about yourself within a connection.

^reply to Lib.

Oh yes I did. It's innate to want that connection. It's hard-wired into our brains (again, for survival purposes). So is the Mere-exposure effect which explains the rest.

Of course, this is all implying that the person isn't actively trying to do harm to you.

Sometimes, the things that are hardwired into our brains can make us be very silly, when we consider how those chemical reactions and survival instincts at times go in direct opposition to the moralities we have set up as a way to uphold a larger society.

Lib just likes making waffles out of pancakes.

Growing up I always felt disjointed from my peers. I could make connections easily with people but it was always difficult to feel truly connected. I was always on a different level and I would always have a hard bridging the gap to really complete the connection. Much like pepper I enjoy stimulating conversations but I'm also like Hattie(I'm a total friend making whore).

I think growing up as an only child I teeter from wanting to be alone to needing as much company as I can get.

The connections that I cherish the most are those that make me feel understood, sharing life changing moments together, knowing we can be our ridiculous selves, call each other on our bullshit, and no matter how long we go without seeing or talking to each other we can pick up from where we left off because we are both very important to each other still.

Pretty much what I've been saying. The system of morality is directly opposing the fundamental concept of selfishness that drives all of us, despite the fact that that morality came from selfishness in the first place. It's the economic desire of wanting everyone to behave in a way that's favorable towards you, while you can act anyway that's beneficial to you. Repeating game theory forces us to behave morally as much as possible, and we have to choose our battles. It's the patterns in these game theory choices that we begin to see and understand in other people, and we can more accurately predict their behavior, causing us to more effectively benefit from being with them, thus the mere-exposure effect developed as a staple to the human brain.

I hadn't ever gotten to considering morality, as a blanket societal item, as deriving from selfishness yet. As a personal item, yes. So that is interesting.

Interesting as well, is the way most seem to consider it, the rules, as a tangible thing that actually exists, as opposed to imaginary items created (for all those selfish reasons) to influence us away from all our potential bumbling around and dying off.

I mostly only go around people for the sake of watching them, taking a look at what they are up to for the fun of figuring out why, and yes, to try to predict what the things will behave like overall in any given situation. Ha. I bet you are the only one here who gets my thinking well enough to know how selfish that is of me!

I totally feel like I am failing the potential that the conversation lib is offering here could be.

Which is funny, considering my statements further up in the topic about interesting conversation.

Lazy yes. Thinking about it instead of expressing anything of substance. Wasn't where I expected the topic to go, so now I have to ruminate to contribute.

Plus, two glasses of beer is enough to dull the thoughts, not quite enough to excite them.

Yeah, I hear ya. I nearly fell asleep in a Starbucks today. I felt homeless and I couldn't study because it just made me sleepier. People kept smiling at me and I could barely acknowledge them. A beer could be useful to me...tomorrow or Saturday.

Shit!Derail.

Get back on track, don't mind me.

drinking beer make me love who ever is around.

It's no biggie, pep. These are things I've been ruminating since high school, where I developed a love of evolutionary thinking and it's way of ultimately, and absolutely, explaining human interaction as whole. It's through my study of economics that I've come to more cumulatively understand the mathematical components of the psychology involved in it as it's developed through these fundamental concepts of the evolutionary process. You all know my love of mathematics as an absolute central study that develops our intuitive understanding of why things are the way they are, and why all things are as they should be. Game theory is beautiful in that regard as it integrates probability, and how the randomness, from the player's subjective standpoint, decreases through its repetitive application over time, which particularly helps me understand the development of the mere-exposure effect, which seems to be the central idea behind the discussion of our appreciation of those we hold dear to us, despite these little "flaws" they have under the standard of what society perceives as objective morality.

Yeah, I just came back from a bar. My head can't be too slow, though. I gotta write a short fictional dialogue right now to turn in tomorrow before going to bed. Alcohol seems to help... hopefully. Also, I just took the most mind-numbing test this morning on Macroeconomic theory, for which I've been cramming 10 weeks of material over the past five days. My brain's going a mile a minute. Right now, I just wanna read about proposed economic policies and use my newfound skills to interpret them academically, but noooooo. I gotta do fun stuff like writing fiction. Pffft. Why can't I just do what I wanna do? I hate it!

Okay, I'm really drunk.

I'll get drunk and come back to this topic at some point and say lots of stuff too.

I like the way you relate economics to everything. I do that with physics, a lot of the time. But I don't say it out loud. But I haven't been reading enough physics recently to be on my game.

You need to get drunk and come back to the Why I Like You thread.

Okay, I'm done with the dialogue. A two page long discussion between Benvenuto Cellini and his rival, Messer Pier Francesco Ricci, about Benvenuto's casting of his Perseus. It's a hell of a lot easier than it sounds.

Anywho, I used to do the same thing with physics, particularly because it more directly applies the fundamental truths of mathematics into reality, but it doesn't particularly extend into the realm of human interaction (at least not in the level that we restrict it to). Economics directly (admittedly more broadly) applies mathematics into human interaction, which seems to be more close to the topic at hand, so yeah... I'll use the slightly more broad concepts of Economics in this discussion. Game theory, to be more specific.

EDIT - Oi oi oi oi!

We aren't going to talk about that.

I think I am so attracted to Chaos theory because of the ways it relates so well to the predictability and unpredictability of human behavior.

I need to brush up on so much though. I haven't been able to focus on any reading properly for a few months now. It is amazing what will fall out of your brain so quickly when you aren't working to keep sharp.

Also, I listened to that whole damn song. Fucking Thank You. Why did I do that.

Cuz it's... fucking... awesome.

This was such a big hit around here a few summers ago. I never liked it though. And now this crap:

That song is le giant in The Netherlands now as well.

Ugh. Maybe it's Portuguese music I don't like.

No, Jess, that's Brazilian Portuguese! Don't pick on the language I'm currently learning!

Just don't sing!