Is It Worthwhile to Ask “Why” When It Comes to People?
How deep do you have to go to decide whether a person is someone you want to have around? Is it worthwhile to ask the question of “why” when it comes to people? Why is this person acting like this? Why is this person believing this and not that? What’s the depth of understanding for the other person required for a romantic relationship, a friendship, a professional relationship to take place?
I usually try to go deep but I’ve come to question myself about the relevance of it all. Shouldn’t I just care about the outcome, about the tangible things that come to life by having these relationships? In the end that’s what matters, no? For instance, how a romantic partner makes you feel, how much fun you have with your friends or how beneficial your business partner is to achieve a certain goal.
I’m wondering. I’m doubting my assumptions. I’m willing to embrace an argument going completely against my current tendencies.
Why you are the way you are: You are a product of your past…unless
Where your “past” starts is out of your control and even after the start, most of what you experience is out of your control.
On top of that, there is some biological component to what makes you, you and shapes your past. You can think of it as a unique set of rules, that apply just to you, and which define the whole array of possible experiences that you could have and be looking back on.
And everyday your are living through the consequences of the past and these can present themselves in different shapes:
A projection of the past to the outside environment: The good and the bad of the past define how you perceive and experience the world. It impacts the way you act, the way you treat people, your preferences and what you believe to be right and wrong to do.
An internalization of the past: The good and the bad of the past define how you perceive and experience yourself. It shows in how you treat yourself, how much you believe in yourself, how you see yourself and the place you assign yourself within this world.
A distantiation and outsider perspective on the past: The past doesn’t define your actions. You have managed to differentiate what happened to you and what you experienced from what makes you, you.
Distantiating yourself from your past.
It’s fair to ask yourself the question: Why would I even want to distance myself from my past? I would say, it is something you might want to consider unless, everything in you life is perfect and there is not a single thing you would like to be different or change whether that’s a relationship you have got or an insecurity that you experience. Doing it has only upsides over the long-term, for yourself and for people around you. In the short term it is work and hard and might be painful.
We have difficulties to see whether it is worth it or not to work through our past. So, I’ve come to believe that no matter who you are it can only be beneficial. And on top of that, the past keeps on accumulating, all the time, since you are moving forward in time.
Outside interpretations of the display of the past.
Most of the time the past can be observed as negative displays. For instance a person that gets angry really quickly or a person that keeps on talking behind other people’s backs. It can also play out in ways that don’t directly affect other people such as drug use or weird fetishes for example. It can manifest itself in the form of diseases, anxiety, fear, trust issues etc.
We tend to attach a large portion of negative displays to the fact that a person has some kind of trauma. For, instance if a person is an alcoholic or takes drugs or beats their children, we tend to not be surprised when there is a childhood experience that might explain this behaviour at least partially. The other portion of negative displays we tend to attach it to the persons character or personality directly.
Sometimes we observe positive displays of the past, in the form of love, laughter, kindness or ambition and hard work. It might also be displayed as health, beauty, fitness or politeness.
We tend to attach positive displays to the person itself, to their character. We don’t think that positivity can also be a product of the past, originating from something similar than a trauma, because in the end a trauma is just an experience that impacts you negatively. What about experiences that impact you positively?
So why could the why matter.
It seems like trying to understand the why of person is most likely related to understanding the negative displays of a person. By trying to understand them deep down I think we are investigating whether a person is simply a mean character person or a person displaying a product of their past.
This approach is stupid and doesn’t really makes sense. What you should be doing instead is trying to understand whether the person has been able to distance itself from their past or not. And if so, whether that person is aware of the fact they have distanced themselves form the past. Let me tell you why.
You could come across a person that is extremely good looking and works out and is healthy and polite and caring and kind and has a bunch of friends and kids and partner. You consider this person to be just a great person overall. You consider “who they really are” to be great. Now what you don’t know is whether their life has just been full of experiences that are being displayed in this positive fashion in the present or whether it actually is their true character. Since the past is always accumulating it could be that the next day a bad thing happens which traumatizes this person and now this person has no clue that this experience has nothing to do with who they truly are, with their character. His displays of the past will become more and more negative.
The “why” is therefore only relevant if you dig into whether a person is able to distance itself form their past not whether its to figure out whether its trauma or their real character, that doesn’t matter.
In that context, does it matter to ask “why”, at all?
The main reason why it wouldn’t matter is that working through the past and distancing yourself takes time and effort. Like with everything it’s a skill that can be learned and as with every skill, the more you practice the better the results. You don’t distance yourself from the past in one day, and displays of the past will stick around for a long time especially if your distancing skills are being practiced for the first or second time. Assuming that most of us work through the past for the first or second time in early adulthood, and our distancing skills are pretty lame until way later in life it seems like most of what we display are simply reflections of the past. It seems like a true character only shines through at the beginning and the end of life and is therefore not really something you can rely on.
Let’s ask this question again: Is it worthwhile to ask the question of “why” when it comes to people?
No.
Embracing the stated arguments and conclusions I would say that the better thing to ask yourself when wondering whether to keep a person around, in a romantic relationship, a friendship or professional relationship is to whether that person is willing to let the past be the past and willing to work through challenges that could be of significance in the future.