I love writing. Or at this point I can simply call this filling up a page with words. It genuinely makes me feel alive. I was going through a phase of loneliness and I kept going back to this idea of “a person is a person through other persons”. And that still may be true, but since I’m not feeling lonely anymore, I don’t have to think about it all the time.
So once (or while) my basic needs are fulfilled, writing genuinely makes me feel alive. Sometimes I want eyes on the stuff that I write, but often I don’t care as much. It’s almost addictive, letting the words flow out of my head, through my body and out on the screen. I think I genuinely achieve flow when I write. Not always, but often enough to enjoy it. And sometimes I’ll aid myself with good music and a nice beverage.
Nothing new, but conflict and being misunderstood is still on my mind, a lot. I don’t currently want to dive deep into it since I feel like it’ll bother me. But I suppose I could dip a toe in and see whether it does.
I had another argument with my mother today and she expressed annoyance about how we’ve been disagreeing over pretty much everything. Now, I do believe I am someone who is very vocal about things I don’t like, specially within relationships that matter to me.. but I think it gets a little complicated with parents or “unequal” relationships. I think something that might be hard for parents is to look at their children, truly, as adults? I mean we often disagree and argue and face conflicts in friendships too, but they’re rarely so intertwined with emotions and history, I suppose.
Anyway, I genuinely think most conflict or dislike is rooted in a lack of complete understanding. And I don’t just mean this in relationships and people, though it’ll obviously be easier to make a case for that. Even “ideas” should be easy enough. Though I think we can “disagree” after a full understanding. What I’m curious about is “dislike”.
The one I’m more interested in is with things like art and “creative” things. I wonder whether the hypothesis “if I don’t like something, it must mean I don’t fully understand it” can be true. I once told someone that I don’t really like EDM, and I always support that with the reason of “I haven’t really heard it enough”.
There’s beliefs in psychological theories of love and attraction that proximity and familiarity can increase both. The reasons might seems obvious but I’m not sure if they are. I also wonder if we can apply the same to art too? It would make sense right? We’re all quite used to the phrase “it’s grown on me”.
What happens when this occurs, let’s say in case of a… song? Do we simply get more “familiar” with it, or do we actually somehow understand it better?
So looks like the mere-exposure effect does apply to all sorts of things, including things like words and paintings. So how does this work? Do we know anything about the reasons or causes behind this effect?
Did a quick search, seems like the two main reasons behind this effect are
- reduced uncertainty, and
- increased understanding and perception
There was a time when I used to think that art is more valuable for the aesthetic value it provides rather than being something one could understand and/or resonate with. I used to often click pictures only for their form and not care much about why people were liking them. People would often say “I don’t get it” to some of my posts and I would just say things like “that’s fine, you can judge it purely based on form”.
But it makes sense now that form could also simply be the first layer or signal to a potential understanding? It’s one of the biggest reasons we conform to societal beauty standards as well, right? To signal an understanding of society.
It makes sense then how repeated exposure could work for reducing the dislike for something as well. First, the danger and uncertainty and fear is eliminated. Once that’s done, we could become curious and more open-minded about really perceiving and understanding the thing or the person.
Does that mean that given enough time, intent and courage we can “grow” to like anything? Probably does. Feels like good news to me, lol. (Now I remember how this is one of the biggest arguments used by the proponents of arranged marriage setups as well.)
This is great. If we start here, we then don’t have to pick things simply because “we already like them” or “we’re already good at them”, we can have the freedom to pick things (or people) based on other factors. Though this sounds great in theory, I already feel an anxiety about time coming up. It tells me how I’m conditioned to want quick returns.
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Since I’m veering towards thinking about this from a romantic relationships perspective again, it might be a good time for me to think about my values and the things I care about —
- Being self-aware and living without least regrets
- If I like doing something I want to be able to do it but I also want to be somewhat aware of why I like doing it
- If I want to do something but I’m not doing it I want to be aware of my constraints and know whether I plan to change them or not (if they’re changeable)
- If they’re unchangeable that’s fine, but I want to be aware of them as well
- Note to self (call grandparents tonight)
- Health (physical and mental)
- Connection (with humans as well as living beings as well as… nature?)
- Being “there” for people
I can’t (at this moment) explain how this came up from whatever I wrote above, but until two years ago, I used to be quite sure of the fact that I want to have kids. I’ve been questioning this for the last year or so. I think the more people I meet who “don’t plan to have kids”, the easier it becomes to question it as well. And sure, it might depend on whether I’ll meet someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, and what their preferences are, etc. But so far it’s nice to be able to even question it.
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