DailyJim: Becoming harder and harder to resist love

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. It's a little earlier today. This is the episode for Wednesday, May 15th, 2024. I want to talk about how I believe it is getting harder and harder to resist love. Love and so what i mean by this is i believe that the environment for humans has changed dramatically in the last oh when did the iphone come out iphone came out 2008 or somewhere around there 2007 i think around that time once phones really started taking off once mobile internet really started taking off especially high speed mobile internet i think it really started changing, and human interactions. I think it may have been that combined with some other things. I mean, I don't know what the precise window is, but this idea that it is much easier to communicate with people. It is much easier to ship goods around the world. So shipping communication is data, shipping goods around the world. It's also easier to ship humans around the world with planes and trains and all sorts of things. And I think as this has happened, it has become really hard for us to resist love. And what I mean by that is I think naturally as human beings, we have a desire to bond, to attach to other humans. Not even just other humans, I mean other animals in general, but especially to other human beings. And I think as we move towards more interaction with each other, it becomes hard to resist the affection that we have towards other people. I think maybe one step change in human evolution or human history was when we went from more nomadic hunter-gatherer foraging tribes or whatnot to agricultural.

And then as we were more agricultural, we started to come together with other people in cities. There was more trading that was happening. And I think when these things happen, there was more interactions with among people. And as there's more interactions, there tends to be, yes, more conflict, but also more love. Um, and I think nowadays.

I think, you know, there are a lot of people who talk about monogamy. I'll just be straight up. I think there are a lot of people who believe strongly in monogamy and desire monogamy, which means kind of the love for one person, like a deep romantic sexual love, a deep attachment to one person and not to many others, especially not to that level. And I think it is becoming harder and harder for people to actually do that from the romantic side from the kind of this monogamy romantic side but also just from a conflict resolution side so I had a friend the other day who told me that there was somebody in their family that did something that really went against their culture and the person was basically kicked out of the family and everyone in the family was told if you're talking with this person you also will be kicked out of the family, Now, back in the day, when somebody lived on separate farms, maybe you would never see this person or you'd see this person once in a year or once in a couple years when they came by because maybe they actually left town and it was hard for them to come back and expensive for them to send a letter and things like this. Nowadays, people can send a message on Instagram, on WhatsApp, on Telegram, on TikTok, on email, on Slack. black on so many different ways. Just a phone call, somebody can show up because maybe if they live far away, they can hop on a plane, then they can show up. If they have a car, they can just show up. So if we live in a city, then maybe they're there all the time. And so it's pretty hard to avoid.

Having conversations with people. We miss, you know, this person was telling me that the person in the family had a kid. And I was like, hey, look at the pictures of the kid. And the person was like, no, no, no, I can't look at the pictures of the kid because I'm getting kicked out of the family. Don't let anyone know that I was. But it's also nice to see the pictures of the kid. And so I think it's not just from a romantic standpoint. There is this drive as human beings, I think, that is very deep for us to bond and attach with each other. And I think sometimes when we get into conflicts, we want other people to detach from others, frankly, sometimes just to detach from life in general. I can't tell you how many people I've pissed off just by still being excited about life and still caring about people. Hey, some people don't even want me to care too much about them. Hey.

And so I think it is becoming harder and harder to resist these urges to reach out to connect to show affection to somebody I you know what if I walk down the street and I see something that reminds me of an ex-girlfriend can I send the message back in the day I would have to maybe write a letter or I'd have to do a phone call when I was sitting in the room with everyone else from the family, they could hear the whole phone call, or they could just pick up the phone and listen to it. Now I can send a message from anywhere at any time. It can be a text message, it could be a voice message, it can be a video message. Anytime. And the person is likely to have the phone on them or near them and receive it within 24 hours, if not within minutes or seconds. And so I think it requires so much effort to repress this and to suppress this. Before I used to call it emotional suppression. I mean, I still think it's a part of it, but I think the suppression of love is almost the suppression of all these different emotions. You know, I think about somebody and I feel angry or I feel excited or I feel grateful or I feel nostalgic or whatnot. Any of these feelings often come with that attachment. And then to communicate that and reach out and connect with that person. I know I'm not allowed to. I shouldn't because somebody in my family doesn't want me to. Somebody in my society doesn't want me to. Somebody in I'm in a romantic relationship doesn't want me to. Or frankly, I don't want me to. and I fight it. Oh, I don't want to still care about that person. Oh, I shouldn't love this person. Man, it's hard to hate when we consistently see, maybe we disconnect from them, we try to avoid them, we block them, they still call. Or we stop watching their stuff on the internet and we still see it though because maybe we get a little bit curious and even though we're not following them anymore, we say, okay, well, let me just make sure that they're okay. And then we care and then we act on the care and then we go, oh, but we're not supposed to care. I just think so much of the struggle in the world is us fighting against the love and fighting against the affection that we have for other human beings. Because we don't want to feel that affection instead of just letting ourselves feeling it and more than anything, wanting to feel it, wanting to have that love and affection for other people, wanting to love. If people just wanted to love, how would this world look different?

But instead, we tend to think that as we get closer and closer, we interact more and more, we're able to push all this stuff down. And I just don't think it was working very well. I can't tell you how many people I've met from a romantic standpoint, but also just from a societal standpoint of conflict resolution when it comes to families, when it comes to cultures and tribes or societies and nations. It just seems that we keep telling each other to suppress love and to push love down and to resist love. And I just don't understand why. Maybe because we're all afraid of dying of STDs. Maybe because we're afraid of losing our culture. I mean, that could be one. Maybe it's like if I'm American and I marry somebody from Kenya, oh, now we are mixed. And so we're no longer strongly American or strongly Kenyan. But this purity culture is not so true. Swahili was a trading language that developed over the many years with Bantu and Arabic and some other languages mixed in. Every language is a mix. Every language is a mix of things that have come before it. Every human is a mix of things that has come before. My gosh, my background is not pure American. What is a pure American? And even if you go back to the Native Americans or the indigenous tribes, they apparently came through the Bering Strait across a land bridge from Russia to the U.S., from Asia to the U.S. So because it wasn't Russia at the time, it was Asia. Maybe it wasn't even Asia at the time. Probably not because these are words that develop over time. Anyways, I'm getting carried away. But it's this idea of, I don't know, we're afraid of mixing. We're afraid of uniting, we're afraid of loving, we're afraid of coming together and yet I think it is so natural for us to do. It is I think one of the strongest desires and urges that we have as human beings. So what the hell would the world look like if we actually stopped resisting the of love and we celebrated it and desired it and we campaigned for it and we dedicated our lives to increasing it.

I don't know. Anyways, late night rambling for y'all tonight and I hope that spurred some thoughts and you would love to hear them. And if not, then I don't know if I believe leave you.

I'm sure you felt something. All right. I'll talk to y'all soon. Bye.