Peacocking

This post started out as a response to a tweet I saw on twitter - the account is private so I won't post a link, but the gist of the tweet was to ask if you need to impress someone in order to gain their attention, were they truly worthy of your friendship? This is my response which has mostly gone unedited.

Yes and no, impressing someone shouldn't be a requirement, but if you don't stand out in some way you don't get noticed. People use different ways to get noticed, some use their looks, some use brains, and some use wealth. What you choose says more about you than who you try to impress. A friendship can be initiated by superficiality but it can't be sustained by it, what really matters is where the interpersonal relationship goes and whether there's a depth that develops. How the friendship was initiated in time will become circumstantial and almost entirely irrelevant. A true friendship will last if that depth comes to mean more to them than peacocking that was employed to gain their attention in the first place.

The truth is you don't need to meet perceived standards to gain the approval of others before they will interact with you. People interact every day with complete strangers who they know nothing about - for example in shops and other public places; they don't just do that because their jobs require it, they do it because others initiate it, this is perhaps best demonstrated by observing the interaction between customers and cashiers - if the customer never speaks then the cashier doesn't usually engage in small talk either, meaning there is only the instinct or the impulse to engage out of reciprocity as opposed to initiation on their part. To put it another way, they have a job to do and don't want your life story but they engage in social interaction when someone else initiates it; this is much more common than people think and extends beyond workplace interaction into our everyday lives beyond these expected roles.

The feeling of needing to meet another person's standards before they interact with you comes from a feeling of insecurity - that can be hard to accept at first and your instinct may be to point to others you deem out of your league who would never interact with you. What you have to realise is that your self worth shouldn't be defined by whether they acknowledge you, the only thing required of you is to initiate interaction, what happens next depends entirely on the other person's internal state which is beyond your control and should not be something you attempt to manipulate.

When we try to compensate for our insecurity, the thing we choose to employ as a means to impress says more about us than it does about them. Being overly extravagant in displaying wealth for instance demonstrates an insecurity in our perception of how successful we are, and consequently we believe success is defined in materialistic terms. Equally using looks, or using brains, both demonstrate similar feelings of inadequacy and over compensation, vanity in the former case compensating for feelings of inadequacy or in the latter case compensating for a feeling of inferiority.

There's nothing you can pick to employ as a means to impress that isn't rooted in some insecurity because the act in itself comes from insecurity and the pursuit of outside validation. Likewise in the extreme reverse a person who makes no attempt to impress demonstrates a sense of resignation one where the feeling of inadequacy and insecurity has eroded self confidence to the point where depression and anxiety have reduced interpersonal relationships to a transactional state, where interaction only occurs out of necessity or when there is something exchanged for that interaction. In other words you speak when spoken to or when you can't communicate what you want in some other way. Perhaps this state could best be described as the feeing of necessity to compensate for our inadequacies or our neuroses but with a complete lack of motivation to invest energy in that endeavour.

Breaking out of that mental prison can be difficult once it has been built up. Even when you are not that far gone, the desire to avoid social interaction except when absolutely necessary can be hard to fight for the simple reason that maintaining social conscience and relationships with others is by nature exhausting. That's perhaps best demonstrated by the retreat from social interaction that is common when people enter into a committed relationship. Their social needs are met by one another with limited effort and subsequently the impetus to seek further social interaction often dies completely. Thought may be given momentarily to the risk of dependency in seeking satiation of those needs from a single source but the effort of seeking the same from multiple sources outweighs the risk leading to the aforementioned resignation.

To reiterate the point, establishing a connection with others in its most primitive form requires nothing more than interaction that is both frequent and cumulative; when you cast your mind back to your childhood and the interactions that lead to friendship, these were in most cases inconsequential but crucially they were repetitive and habitual - play groups, schools, even playing with other kids in the neighbourhood. There is a desire to distinguish childhood interaction from adult interaction and assert supremacy of the latter in the belief that our social interaction and the behaviours that facilitate it are elevated and evolved but in truth all interaction follows the same pattern.

The only thing that evolves is the language we choose to use to interact with others and the range of topics we feel comfortable talking to them about. Ironically this range of topics in terms relative to the size of the Universe from which they are drawn is higher in childhood than it is in adulthood. If you consider the Universe of topics we can talk about as those which we are aware of, and the subset of topics we are willing to talk to others about, in childhood these two are the same size because a child will literally talk to another child about anything at all. It is only in adulthood that we impose limits and create multiple subsets from that Universe of topics depending that we perceive as suitable for the intended audience. While it is true that with age we become versed in a wider range of topics that we can engage in conversation about, we rarely identify individuals as capable of conversing on all of those subjects. "I can talk to you about anything" is a statement we usually reserve for only our most intimate connections where the prevailing influence of self-image is negated by the level of comfort we have in the other person's presence.

It is also the adult desire to skip over the mundane aspects of life and jump straight to relationships of depth that often lead us to avoid interactions with others that we deem repetitive and unnecessary but it is for this very reason that those attempts often fail that is once again for the same reason that superficiality fails to sustain a relationship - they both lack substance. Here lies the distinction that substance should not be conflated with depth, while the latter may seem more important it is not the primary source of emotional attachment. While superficiality is much more apparent in its base nature, with its insignificance seemingly easy to understand, depth is much more insidious. There is the desire to believe that depth in conversation leads to depth in connection but in truth it tends only to lead to self reflection and introspection because through conversations of depth, our beliefs are exchanged and then contemplated and examined, like exchanging gifts we open them up and pick them apart - the interaction in this regard is transactional which we've already established does not promote interaction but instead emphasise seclusion and reticence. The presents you receive from people at birthdays and Christmas may be memorable or have great significance but your emotional attachment to the individual will revolve to a greater extent around the repetitive habitual interaction that you both sustained.

Substance then can be said to only truly be derived from that which is inconsequential because it does not result in a transactional exchange, instead it causes development of emotional connection through comfort in one another's presence, and shared experience that remains valid and does not seek to invalidate one another's beliefs or experiences. The friends we made in childhood often grow apart from us in adulthood because we begin to analyse our experiences and compare our interpretations and where those interpretations differ conflict inevitably ensues as the validity of our experience is challenged by the disparity between our shared perceptions of that experience.

To bring this all back to the original point, how you meet someone is often considered a source of profundity in a relationship or the foundation on which the friendship will be built but to reiterate the point, the depth of experience does not determine its impact in time it only determines its impact in the moment. As time progresses and the variable increases the proportionate impact scales inverse to the point of insignificance. It is the cumulative aspect of repetition and habit that develops our emotional connection because that variable grows as long as the relationship is maintained and consequently holds a greater significance - in other words through paradox it is insignificance in time that accumulates to form significance, and it is significance in the moment that diminishes in time to become insignificant. To underline this point and hit home the argument, if you have been married for 40 years the method of proposal your partner used will now be irrelevant to the strength of your marriage and the depth of your emotional connection to your partner, yet, in the moment it was perhaps one of the most significant events of your life.

So how does this help you form relationships either romantic or platonic with others? Well to reiterate the point once more, the more habitual and repetitive your interactions become the more attached you will grow in time, the emphasis on significance is something that is a notion of romanticism not a notion of realism - this is why most relationships fall apart after the "honeymoon" period because the reality of sharing a life of mundane moments with another person doesn't seem appealing because our sense of insecurity or our sense of inadequacy compels us to believe that our every interaction has to be profound - it doesn't.