Are You Struggling With RELATIONSHIPS?

 

Humans seem to be pretty happy when they form communities. However, you define that. Romantic partnership, family communities, religious groups. But some communities are miserable. So the nature of the community matters, right? We noticed that in some communities the bonding is not healthy and not good for the individuals involved and they don't thrive. I consider myself a lover, not a fighter, so I'm a huge believer in the love-it-all philosophy. I fight in order to love right? So love is at the core of all of this. It's a love of life. It's a love of the world out there and it's a love of other people because they represent value to you. So the stickiness is there. My point is, age should be chosen. It should be consciously chosen, and forget the state for a minute, forget coercion, forget all that. What I would encourage individuals to do is to think about their relationships, to choose the best relationships possible, and to seek out great relationships because other human beings are of immense value to us. And, when I write, it's easy and obvious to think of it as a materialistic kind of thing. You know, It’s like trading, but trading is much more subtle than that, and much more can be much more spiritual than that. It's about trading in emotions. It's about the way one sees each other. It's what one gets from one another. I think friendship is a form of trade. Now, I know that seems to make it material, but I don't think it's a trade as a material thing. But friendship is incredibly important in life. Love is incredibly important in life and having a group of friends is incredibly important. How can I try to be eloquent on this? If you look at human history, if you give people freedom in terms of stickiness in human relations, and so on. You start getting more Tinder, online dating, the stickiness dissolves just like in chemistry, you start to have a gas versus a liquid. Those are the words you have to wait for, you have to study what actually happens if you emphasize that stickiness, the bonds of humans, is holding you back. The exercise of voluntary choice is the highest ideal; the danger for that to be implemented or interpreted in certain kinds of ways by us flawed humans that are not I mean, you could say we're perfectly reasonable, rational things are all of our decisions, but really, I mean, especially if you're young, you get horny, you make decisions that are suboptimal; perhaps, the point is you have to look at the reality of when you emphasize different things. So we talk about what is the ideal life, what is the ideal relationship; you have to also think about what you are emphasizing. I think you both agree on what's important. That community can be important and freedom is important. What you're really emphasizing is the community, of the family, of the stickiness, and of the nation. I don't want to deny the place of the individual. I think there really was a very great change in civilization when the Books of Moses announced that the individual was created in the image of God. I think the agreement that we do have about the positive value of the creative individual, the positive value of the individual's desire to improve the world, and, that means, including his or her desire to improve his family, his tribe, his congregation, his nation. but it still comes from this kind of what’s called selfishness, the desire to make things better for yourself.