One Hundred and Ninety Eight

I’m as alone as I'd be if I were living on a desert island.  We’re all alone, but not all of us admit it because we’re social animals by nature, herd animals.  There’s safety in numbers, so in this increasingly unsafe world we huddle together as close as we can get.  But not too close.  Talleyrand said we invented language so that we could conceal our thoughts from each other.  We need the company of others in order to survive, and will lie—to ourselves as well as to others—in order to get it.

Some of us seek the company of our own kind, or those we think are our kind, thinking it the easiest to get; but the search can be difficult because although we’re all alike in some ways, in others each of us is unique (We’re all alike in being unique).  Each of us lives a life that’s in some ways not like anyone else’s, and learns things from it no one else knows.  Communicating those things to others can be difficult. 

Many of our problems are due to our pretending we’re all alike, therefore communication between us should be easy.  When it’s not, we assume the other person is lying because that’s what we would do; and we’re all alike.

Some of us seek the company of those who are, or seem to be, different—not only different from us, but from our kind—people to whom and/or with whom we can do things we can’t do to and/or with our own kind.  And some of us seek people who are not just different, but unique.  We may want to emulate them, or we may want to destroy them in order to assure ourselves it’s dangerous to be unique, so we’re safer being, or pretending to be, like everyone else.  Usually we want to do both, because our heroes are never as heroic as we want them to be, nor our villains as villainous, and they must be punished for disappointing us.

People are too much alike in their willingness to lie, to others and to themselves, in order to get what they want, or think they want, which usually isn't what they really want.  I’ve always thought of dealing with others as a game in which I had to overcome the obstacles they set for themselves as well as for me.  I used to play that game well, and took pleasure in doing so. But as I grew older, I grew tired of it. 

Dealing with other people, all of them pretending to be alike, saying the same things and doing the same things, grew painfully boring.  Je suis Sisyphe, et mon enfer, c'est les Autres.