I first started to think about this subject by observing my father's interaction with my aging grandparents. I see my grandparents entirely different than my father does. This in itself is not all that insightful or interesting, but the reasons why might be.
I see my grandparents as dynamic people who's reality changes on a yearly basis. As they age new challenges crop up that must be dealt with and accepted. Not all problems, such as Parkinson's, can be fixed. Therefore they grow. I'm amazed by my grandparents ability to not become bitter and spiteful.
On the other hand my father is often frustrated with them. I realize that he is sad at their aging and pending death, but he is also missing out on their last years. My question is why?
I started to think about how I think of my father and what bothers me about him. I'm not talking about 80's music and Hawaiian shirts. I'm talking about how he's changed over the years and how that clashes with how I identify him.
As a child he was the epitome of authoritarian rule. Always right, heavy handed with punishment, and doled out rewards sparingly. He had a hard job with a bad marriage, so I don't blame him. In fact I adapted and actually enjoyed the regimented life after a while. I started to excel at school and sports (social life not so much... ). I liked the challenge and it actually made my home life easier to have perfection to focus on.
Now my father is divorced and retired. He is remarried and much happier. He is now getting more education, up on current affairs, and quite a nice guy. I am happy for him and love the changes, but it clashes with my version of him. He is so mellow these days that he is often late which would have been unheard of two decades ago. The military precision of my childhood doesn't leave any room for this. Also his warmth to strangers and their mistakes seems almost impossible. I know these are good qualities, but they have nothing to do with the father I grew up with. I can't stand these things and grow frustrated with him on a daily basis.
So my father changes and I can't adapt to it. This thought brought me back to my grandparents. Maybe my father has the same problem. Maybe he remembers some overpowering facet of their personality from childhood that has softened or changed over time. I have read before that as parents age their children see cracks in the super-hero stereotype from their childhood. That is obviously not the whole story as shown by my father image. Its more general than that. Something about our parents, a trait, becomes central to how we see them. From experience I'd have to say that this identity rarely changes if at all.
Maybe we all see our parents as one dimensional stereotypes. I'm only beginning to think about what this means. I find it an interesting observation that deserves more thought.
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Hmm, I think you are on to something here.
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved back in with my parents I have had to deal with the expected annoyances of living with parents after having not lived with parents, but I have found that there is an added annoyance of the change in their personalities. I had attributed it to Utah rubbing off on them and the idea that in my absence they inherited some of those traits that I hate about Utah, but now that I think about it I realize that a lot of it probably is just that they have changed and that I do like to think of them as static people, as you now suggest.
I do not know that it is just confined to parents, though.
As I was writing out this response my first thought was that as human beings, we like to have stability as much as possible and one easy way to achieve this is through making everyone else as static as possible. One time I was sitting on the couch with Frankie and I just sat there and stared at him for a couple of minutes not saying anything until I blurted out, “Wow, you’re really a person.” He laughed at me and called me a jerk, but it is difficult for me to constantly keep in mind that other people are just as much in existence as a person as I am. A good possibility to that is that I really am just a selfish jerk, but (as any selfish jerk would do) I rationalize it by thinking it is just human nature and I am not alone. For every second I am alive and thinking all of the thoughts that I am thinking, so is everyone else who is alive. Everyone is thinking thoughts and coming to conclusions and it is too hard to go out of yourself enough to give credit to everyone for thinking as much as you think yourself.
So with a big importance on self, at first I thought maybe the answer to why we don’t like it when our parents change is that we like to think of ourselves as the only ones that change and try to make everything else as static as possible.
(At this point I made the next jump that any selfish person would make by trying to rationalize being selfish.)
On an intellectual level, we know that everyone around us changes just as much as we do personally, but this is too much for our brains to compute. If we are recognizing that everyone around us is always changing then we get bogged down. Dealing with an infinite amount of changes for every instance for every person that we encounter doesn’t work in real life, so to cope with this infinite amount of information, our brains just save people to little blips in time. We just take little screenshots of everyone and update them when updates are available.
This typically works well. In the case of your grandparents or people you don’t see often, you expect updates to occur that often so you can accept the bad frame rate you get when dealing with them. With people you see every day, you get updates every day and don’t notice their changes. This is obviously most easily seen with a child and the child’s physical growth—living with the child means you don’t notice the change day to day, but someone who has not seen the child for a week notices a huge difference. It is important to see that mental growth is just as much of a change as physical growth—we just don’t always think of them in terms of the overall change of a person.
The problem occurs when this frequency changes—if we don’t get an update when we expect one. When it comes to parents, we spend so much time growing up with them and seeing all of their changes that when we leave and they continue to grow without us seeing the growth, it makes us uncomfortable. We are used to our memories of them being in sync with the actual them, so the idea that there is a difference between what our minds think is a person and what a person is makes us uncomfortable. Maybe it is an emotional discomfort that this person you know and love isn’t the same as the person you think they are or maybe there is just an inherent problem of us just being wrong. Maybe our bodies have a reaction to the idea—I have this information about this person that is usually correct, but now I’ve gone and got it wrong and that is an uncomfortable feeling.
ReplyDeleteThe next question I want to ask then is, if that is the reason why kids don’t like it when their parents change, then does the same go for the parents. Parents would have just as much discomfort over the changes their kids undergo as the kids would for their parents. My guess is that parents do, and that discomfort is part of the difficulty of their kid growing up. If a parent can’t handle the discomfort or even mentions the discomfort, then they’re criticized for not being able to let their kid grow up. There is less of a force out there telling the kids to let their parents grow up.
And there are the cases of when the parent doesn’t just let their kid go, and maybe that is (one of the reasons) why Frankie’s parents hate me. Frankie changed in front of them for so long, left for a couple of years, and when they were there to witness his newer changes they also saw a Kiri there which allowed for an easy scapegoat for the discomfort.
So I started out thinking that it makes us upset because we like to think of ourselves as the main forces of control—that we have the power to change stuff around us and it just makes us uncomfortable to be reminded that everything else changes just as much as we do so how much can we really do, but then I moved on to thinking that it is more a matter of what our brains can handle—the shortcuts it takes to handle processing the world and the problems that arise when these shortcuts (that usually work) suddenly don’t—when we’re not dealing with a quick maintenance update but a lengthy patch full of hours of download time followed by potential bugs and crashes.
I agree that we think of people as static entities. I think the update to our static image happens subconsciously, unless something out of character happens.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that we grow and change with our inner circle of friends. We share movies, inside jokes, styles, games, and special moments in time. In this sense everyone is changing, maybe not going the exact same direction, but along a similar path (a vector field with a small divergence for the math dorks). I know that I get lost in the flow of time and don't really see myself or any of my close friends and family changing. I'm immersed in the changes of my reality that is also influenced by them (and inversely).
I guess I can't see the small changes in people I'm close to day to day so I recognize a static image that moves and changes with me. So If I ever analyze say Chris, I will always see Chris. But if I were to step back and compare Chris to Chris minus 5 years I would not see the same person.
This could be a good explanation to what I experience with my parents and you with yours. After stepping away for a while we don't subconsciously update our perception of their identities, so we see the last updated version. This could lead to the "gowning pains" of re-acquaintance.
This doesn't really explain why parents have difficulty watching their children grow up. Maybe there is a similar disconnect during periods of rapid change. Children do seem to grow right before our eyes, so I can imagine there isn't the same type of static identity that we assign to someone our own age. Maybe sudden illness or a friend's beginning/ending of a relationship also create this same sudden change.
This also brings up an idea that I've thought about over the years. Long distance relationships and more specifically why they suck. After high school I dated my high school sweetheart for the next two years (3 total). I always felt like if we weren't together than we were growing apart. When we were together over the summers or Christmas, we would have a great time and really connect, but as soon as we would return to our respective universities we would grow apart again. This makes sense. We had different friend groups, different experiences, and even different expectations. Eventually we broke up and we both felt like we didn't even know the other. Maybe we didn't.
Maybe removing someone from our concurrent stream of reality puts their identity on a divergent path that can't be mended without effort.
I'm fascinated by these ideas. We've been able to take this from a parent-child perception issue and generalize it somewhat to an interpersonal relationship mechanic.
P.S. I'd love to have this whole conversation again in math land with graphs and vector fields! I envision a flow of time with little Xs for all the people in our social circle and arrows for how they move in time. Some closer, some farther, some moving to other circles... so cool.
wow ! long answers & long comments!! i was just gonna say "don't make me start about my father" lol
ReplyDeletePlease break our theories! That's the fun part and then we start over again:)
ReplyDeleteSorry, when I first wrote this way back when it got a bit out of hand and stopped making any sort of practical sense, so I had to go over and take out chunks so that it might make sense again. Between not wanting to go through that process and forgetting about it completely, a fair amount of time has passed. Whoops.
ReplyDeleteI think the beauty of math is wonderful and one of the reasons why it is so beautiful and so amazing is how it applies to humans. The fact that we can even do math and the ideas of how real it is and how much a part of it we are versus how much a part of us it is are all ideas that I love, but regardless, the connection between humans and mathematics is present and I think tying that into this discussion makes the discussion richer. We think in mathematical terms (even when we don’t know it) and we don’t like it when things don’t fit in how they should. This gets back to irregular updates versus frequent updates.
If we are thinking of people as static entities that are updated then each of those static updates can be thought of as a point on line. For people we expect to not have regular subconscious updates for, a brain knows it needs to connect the dots to make a somewhat jagged and ugly line. For people we see often we get much smoother curves and lines and we can have an infinitesimal amount of updates. Because of this, our brains are then used to being able to draw pretty lines using calculus and it is less about connecting the dots and more about using the function as a whole with the infinite lines of the infinite points. Then when we don’t see the person anymore our brain still expects a smooth curvy line and not so much a preschool style connect the dot line. We have what was once a beautiful function now suddenly not even a continuous one. It has these jumps and annoyances which make it extremely lame and there is less you can do with it. Note that this would also occur if the person has a sudden change and acts outside their normal behaviors while still having frequent updates (midlife crisis style) as this would still cause a discontinuity. After the change has occurred then your brain can downgrade back to a lesser level and makes the dots that can just be roughly connected by a child again, but until the lines move up from a preschool level to calculus then likewise the relationship cannot have the same complexities that it once had.
The complexity, subtleties, and beauty present in the line directly correspond to the complexity, subtleties, and beauty present in the relationship. I think it is one thing to imagine how frustrating it is to suddenly go from witnessing lots of changes in personality to fewer changes but when thinking in terms of mathematics you can see just how much you really are losing when someone goes from frequent updates to rare ones.
I think it works nicely to think of us all as vectors. Obviously people are always changing so thinking of us not as points in time but instead as vectors helps add a layer to the discussion.
If we are just lines with a direction that changes as we change, then what does that mean for our relationships. Does it matter if our vectors are close in position to other vectors or does it matter more if the direction our changes are parallel to each other? Considering the fact that you can be good friends with someone and be so different than each other then it would seem that having parallel movement is more important than actual location or distance from each other. As you were saying, when you are with someone, then you are being influenced by the same things and therefore are more likely to be changing in the same way. So if you think of us as all starting at different points at a certain time and then we are all changing in a parallel direction then it makes sense that we would be less likely to start disliking the person. Likewise, any time you are put into a situation with a bunch of other people, then merely by going through the experience—and by being changed by that experience in a parallel way, even if you don’t like that person you may at least feel a bond of fellowship with them—of parallelship. There is also the idea that we can still approve of the changes of someone very different from us. If there is someone who has fundamentally different ideas than you do—fundamental to the extent that it would normally prevent a friendship—but they decide they want to change, then a chance for friendship suddenly occurs. Even if they are far away from you, as long as they want to change and as long as they are moving in that same direction, then, even though you can disagree with their current thoughts, you still respect that they are trying to change.
ReplyDeleteThose thoughts all support the idea that the direction of the movement is key to a friendship, but we can check the other side and think about the idea of positioning instead. There is the idea of two people at the opposite ends of a spectrum--take the previous idea of someone changing—someone was on one side but then had an epiphany and they are suddenly moving parallel to you. But then let’s say that you also had an epiphany and are moving towards them. If you are both changing towards the others beliefs then you are likely to have the same level of respect because the person is changing towards your way of thinking. In this case, you are moving in opposite directions bust still toward each other which would imply positioning is more important than direction itself.
Maybe then it is a combination of people moving in the same direction as you and where your locations are or maybe I’m missing some piece. Or maybe going in the same direction is not the cause of the friendship at all. There is that causal question: Do we like parallel people because they are parallel or is it just more likely that if we are moving parallel to each other then we whatever we like about each other won’t change. Or most likely, did I get myself too wrapped up in what I was saying and just confuse myself.
There is, of course, any number of ways we change--every aspect of our personalities has the option to change. So then maybe the positioning is the most important factor. The distance between the people in the relationship either has to be small or it has to be shrinking. The parallel changes only matter because you are changing together and not moving farther away from each other. Everyone puts different values on which aspects of life or personalities are most important and necessary for friendship and that determines whether or not a person likes another person, but for those core aspects small distance is vital.
So when not seeing someone for awhile, you have the sudden discomfort at losing the beauty of the relationship and, assuming you can get over that discomfort, you also have the question of where the points end at. By not being near each other you lessen the chance that your changes are parallel and are more likely to no longer be in compatible locations. I think the complexity of the curve reflects how much you feel you “know” the person and the location of your points at a given time reflect how much you “like” the person.
ReplyDelete