pragmatism and cold blood

May 17th, 2006

Yes, that's what I think my social strategy needs, if not requires. I tend to be fairly focused in my social interactions - when I meet a new person, it doesn't take me very long to classify this potential new relationship into one of two categories. Yes, this looks promising. Or, no, I don't care about this at all. The second type I think we all have a lot of the time... people who put us off with a bad sense of humor, who have radically different opinions on things important to us, who carry themselves in a way we don't approve of, who don't seem to get us - in short, people we don't really like. That's quite simple, unless we are made to spend time with them, we can just cross them off the list immediately.

But the former kind of people, those who seem to have a lot of potential, are very tricky to pursue often. Even if a person does seem interesting and appealing, there are still many obstacles in the way of friendship. This is where circumstances can completely ruin the chances of this going anywhere. For instance, you may not have time to pursue this relationship, or even though you're fairly certain that this has potential the other person may not be, or they are not looking for any new friends right now, or well you get the idea. So there's a fairly big step going from just meeting someone and thinking they are worth pursuing, to getting to a point where both of you agree that you want this, to actually going anywhere with it. Now, sometimes you will get to "stage two" of that cycle and it will just never materialize, not for a lack of good will, but because of circumstances. This is very frustrating. By that time I will have invested myself emotionally into this and when it fails to go anywhere, I get quite disappointed. Miistake. This is where some cold blood could help.

Even though I have this binary classification system, it doesn't really reflect reality. I have a lot of relationships which are neither the zero nor the one, neither hopeless nor solid friendships. They are just in between, mostly promising relationships that stagnated at some point, or good relationships that faded, but not completely, just to a point where they are still useful. And so I'm starting to think that my approach is wrong. Instead of trying hard and getting disappointed when it doesn't work out, I should probably consider relationships more like a stock broker would handle stock. With a robotic disregard for individuals and just trying to maximize on investment at any given moment. Pursue any relationship of interest to the extent that the present situation allows, and at the same time accept loss with cold blood. Instead of making it a tick in the "loss" column and letting out a big sigh, I shouldn't even care, just move on to the next one. And maybe a week later try to revive the one that wasn't going well and see if it does better. No building, no long term concerns, just short term strategy.

:: random entries in this category ::

1 Responses to "pragmatism and cold blood"

  1. erik says:

    I don't really relate. I don't think about friendships, don't judge people on potential and all that. If I meet someone; I do my best to make it a pleasant situation (read: conversation). And through the rest of life, if someone invites me, calls me, whatever, I judge only the moment: "No I don't feel like doing that right now" or "Yeah that would be great". Those judgements are based both on the people and the situation at that very point in time. I refrain from judging/examining friendships.