“There are two attitudes you can bring to your interactions with others. You can want something from them like a favour, money, approval, or for them to change. Or you can enjoy them for who they are.”
Sam Harris
This is a little note I wrote to myself. It doesn’t look very profound but, it was a little penny-drop moment.
I was visiting my parents. They need quite a bit of help with fixing stuff, handling technology, making appointments and so on. And I like to help them with it. But the list is endless, and I was getting tense about the impossibility of completing it all in the week I was there.
I realised I had overlooked the main thing. This was a chance to spend some time together and my stressing about “getting jobs done” was hollowing it out. Thankfully, I had I caught myself, let go, and was able to engage more joyfully as a result.
I’d accidentally fallen into instrumentalising myself.
Instrumentalising
The left hemisphere of the brain loves to see everything as a “tool” and ask “What is it for?” The switch on the wall is to produce light. The bus is to move people around. The dollar is to buy stuff.
We can sometimes experience our lives like this too. Earn some money in order to buy ingredients in order to do some cooking in order to eat in order to be strong in order to work etc etc.
It’s called “instrumentalising” – seeing everything as a tool to get something else.
Sometimes we might slip into seeing ourselves that way too. The point of me is that I do this useful thing, that I bring this benefit.
It’s lovely to help, of course. But if we do it too much, we make our relationships transactional. It’s literally “self-sacrificing” in the sense that “you” as a person are no longer there, only you as a tool to achieve something else.
“Real friends are useless,” as Arthur Brooks says. They’re not for anything. The relationship is an end in itself.
Ends in Ourselves
Modern left-hemisphere-driven culture tends to minimise this part of life. Whenever someone develops a hobby, people start asking if they’re going to turn it into a business!
Some activities – and this is a good definition of “play” – are ends in themselves. (The fancy word is “autotelic.”) They’re not for anything else. As Alan Watts said, the aim of dancing isn’t to get to the other side of the dancefloor. The aim of music isn’t to get to the end. If we try to these activities to deliver a separate benefit, we’ve turned them into tools.
Some of our most valuable relationships need us to show up not serve some other purpose but to appreciate the relationship – and our part in it – as an end in itself.
This is not a recipe for selfishness. It’s natural and healthy to enjoy supporting others. But with self-imposed boundaries to protect your joy, which sometimes already IS your most important gift. Treasure it!
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
Alan Watts