Alternatives to individualism in an individualist environment
It wasn’t just that I can’t really remember if anyone asked me that directly and with such formality, what was more surprising was that the question was in my work email: ‘would you happen to be single?’
This was an email I received a few months ago in my work email account, offering a dating concierge service for busy professionals. Minutes later I started writing a response that was quickly getting an aggressive lecturing tone, so I stopped, left this draft brewing for months (also, writing hasn’t been a high priority recently) and started picking it up recently, only after certain events happened and allowed me to see things differently.
The service offering in that email touched a few sensibilities in me, so under my initial thinking, the underlying message was: life is too busy, there is so much to do and achieve as a professional that any help you can get and pay for to fulfill the other aspects of your life is welcome, like a service to find a life partner.
I thought, if you really can’t stop looking after yourself even to find companionship, how can you expect someone else would be spending any time with you in the long term?
Then, after cooling down and giving it another thought, I considered there could be the argument of just wanting to have some low commitment level, almost on demand sharing time. I mean, why would this service be necessarily about love? This can be just about having fun, finding another way to spend time, socialize and, after all, fulfill some much needed satisfaction. But that still made me feel a bit upset.
Finally I came to terms and accepted what I was really uncomfortable with was being presented with a bigger realm of individualism than what I’m used to. I’m constantly trying to push back on that self centered approach to life and denying it as viable path to happiness I could take, so naturally this was kind of unsettling.
But pushing back on it, and replying that email attacking that company’s values of course wouldn’t be healthy nor helpful. After all, anyone can try whatever they want to pursue what they want for their lives, so what I can really do instead, is trying to elaborate why I think there are better approaches to pursue wellbeing.
Shared happiness
I believe relationships are my most important asset and individualism pushes them to a lower priority, so in the increasingly common process of feeding my beliefs with reinforcing evidence (who isn’t doing that nowadays right?), I often read about how individualism can be really bad for ourselves. Like this white paper I ran into that analyzes how loneliness hurts us even at a cellular level. That can be worrisome considering that, in the US, already a third of the people over 65 are living alone or feeling lonely.
Or more romantic and less scientific if you want, I always remember the story of Chris McCandless, the guy that inspired the book and movie Into the Wild (with a great soundtrack by Eddie Vedder :), who after a long time living in the wilderness with no possessions concluded that happiness is only real when shared. You can look up his story. Some people criticize its influence because of how naive he was (and it can go quite controversial from there), but still that quote stuck with me.
I also think that no matter how cliché or cheesy it can sound and how many times it has been sung, love is the best driver for our long term plans. And that maybe is where that email offering a dating concierge for busy professionals kicked me in the gut. To me, love is not about investing or even outsourcing (like it was being suggested in this case) some time in scouting and researching until you finally find your soul mate. That approach is what I think leads to frustrations that are becoming so evident now that this article was one of the NYTimes most read in the 2016.
I think love it’s about sacrifice, compassion, and understanding that a couple’s relationship involves three parties: ‘you’, ‘me’ and ‘us’. And each of those three require attention and care, while they keep changing, evolving and learning from and influencing each other.
Well, all of that background and internal battle is just context for what I’m experiencing these weeks. As a family, we have taken a decision some people could find unconventional. Despite having a very good living, a nice place to live in, great friends, and many other great features at one of the most attractive cities in the country and probably the area with the most job opportunities in the world for my job, we are moving out. We are moving to another great city, and that seems to distort the narrative and put the focus on comparing city A vs city B. But we are actually shifting the family priorities so we can rebalance the attention the three entities have gotten and we can better nurture the relationship, for today and especially for the future. After years being where I could have a great job, we are simply moving to where my wife can have a similar opportunity. She studied as hard as I did and likes working as much as I do, so holding her from pursuing her professional goals because we prioritized mine for too long would be, well… too individualist. Sooner or later, that could blow up and leave us frustrated and potentially lonely. So better done that said, it’s time to focus on the ‘you’ so the ‘us’ can be even better.
