Today I want to discuss the nature of how we relate to each other. As I was talking to my niece the other day, I realized we always act differently based on our situation. This may be a given fact, however, the way we speak to our friends and the way we speak to our parents or teachers are two different things. A hierarchy developed at some point that is truly ingrained in us. The complication of the hierarchy, definitely, varies based on the individual.
And to the people who say, life is all about how we view ourselves, I won’t say it’s false, but there are so many unconscious layers of hierarchies through how we define reality, that it’s very difficult to view ourselves logically with our consciousness.
In a previous blog, I talked about mirror neurons. As kids start modeling the world based on the people around them, they also start categorizing people that are close to them. This categorization of how they should behave with certain people persist for a long time. The categorization happens in everything in life actually. I mean our perception is also a categorization based on our individual experience of reality.
But there is a hard categorization that can develop based on our early experiences. I was always very shy with my teachers. I believe that’s because I viewed the teachers as supreme authority figures that would yell at me if I did something wrong, in my case I was traumatized by getting hit by a teacher when I was a little kid in Bangladesh. My categorization for teacher-like authorities thus devolved into caution.
I used to never notice what my body did. It’s amazing to notice and realize that we are a being that is controlled by trillions of cells. Our body is a compilation of different groups of living creatures from all walks of life. And we are just a complex being created by little organisms working in a hierarchy. Categorizing the world and then responding based on the hierarchy is a law of life in my opinion. Even stereotypes are just a categorization of different people. It’s created so people don’t have to consciously think about how to react to new people they see.
Our brain is really primed for taking shortcuts. The reason we become better at everything we do is because we start taking shortcuts. And these shortcuts appear in the form of habits. And the habits are ingrained in our unconsciousness. Just like walking or running, we can start to notice new things as the things that were once difficult become habitual.
And thus relationships between human beings are the same, we become who we are close to. We mimic what the other person does and slowly we notice the slightest change in the other person.
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