- Me, 1st November 2015, on Twitter somewhere.
By way of introduction, one thing I love about Twitter is that it forces me to be concise. I will do my utmost to write a coherent thought within the 140 character limit. If I can afford extravagances like bullet points, numbering, and line breaks, then I will put them in as well. And if I can’t, I will go through any number of literary and linguistic contortions to get the tweet right; including replacing words with shorter words, and replacing word combinations with others that take up less characters. I have had plenty of experience in this, especially during the years where I was studying, and had to contend with various word limits.
If I still can’t say what I want, then I will either give up, or, do one thing I hate, which is to abbreviate and use slang-ish type words, like “h8” and “l8r”, and use ampersands (&) instead of the word “and”, use numbers instead of numbers (47/forty-seven) and various other crimes against English that would make my various English teachers groan and put their heads in their hands.
And the reason for explaining all this is to then highlight the tweet that I started with. It took a few goes to end up with that formulation, but I am happy with it; and I hope to achieve with such tweets to contain a whole argument or point of view that can be expanded upon at leisure, which is what I hope to do now. This is also the introduction part of the post done. (I also apologise for not embedding it; currently I am keeping my twitter profile on private.)
It is true, of course.
We have gone from primitive cave-dwellers and hunter-gatherers, to so, so much more. The one fundamental driver in this change is the human brain, a glorious gift. Being able to grasp logic and rules, being able to harness fire, to build tools, to communicate ideas, to use tablets (ha!) and later, scrolls to be able to read and write, to organise in complex societies and tribes, to understand and utilise the principle of division of labour, to measure time, to incept trade, commerce, and banking, to manufacture at scale, to print books, to create standards and laws, to develop healthcare, to industrialise farming, to eliminate need (we are not there yet), to invent flighted, landed, and seaborne travel, to see and split the atom, to map the human gene, to put man on the moon, to create the digital world, to transmit messages across the world in seconds or less - wow.
To our 5,000 year old ancestors, what we do today would be magical. In fact, science that we use in our everyday lives should be considered just as magical and wondrous as that in the stories we read; it is just familiarity that has dulled us to it.
And we have gone beyond the practical; to invent philosophy, politics, literature, art, music*, and poetry, to strive to discover meaning and joy in the mundane and the profound. Some works of poetry and literature are so powerful that they have survived hundreds and thousands of years. We have the wisdom of the sages throughout the ages at our fingertips to draw upon, to fill our heart with their teachings, and our brains with learning from their successes and from their mistakes; we truly can, to paraphrase a certain Mr Newton, stand on the shoulders of giants.
And yet, despite all this…
We still fail at human-human relationships. I don’t get it. If humanity has been around for 6,000 years at the least, and billions (if not more) human-human relationships have existed before us, why are we so bad at them? Additional questions follow:
- Why is the majority of my social media feed just complaints about people, and appreciation for “things”?
- Are we fated to repeat the relationship mistakes of the people who came before us?
- Are we even going to see the mistakes in our conduct with other people?
- Does the huge disparity in experience that every human has make it not more likely that we will get an equally wide disparity in advice, should we choose to ask for it?
- Why is it, when two divorce lawyers choose to marry, that the joke is that the new marriage is “a triumph of hope over experience”? (ok, this is not a serious question, but I had to insert a joke somewhere)
To summarise: Why is it that humanity has no problem conquering technical challenge after technical challenge, but even the most “clever” humans have serious relationship issues, and, anecdotally, the more clever ones have more trouble with their relationships?
I don’t know. The more I think about it, it seems that we only every have a couple of key relationships with other humans, and these themselves are subject to having the dynamic change and alter over time. I think eventually, all humans discover/realise that these are the relationships that are crucial, and determine the majority of your happiness. I make them as follows:
- Parent-child (both ways)
- Siblings
- Spousal / Marriage
- Extended family
- Friendships.
To me, the most important one is the spousal / marriage one. The others are also extremely important, but the spousal / marriage one is the one that I see most people complaining about, celebrating, and making others sick with**.
It’s also the only that most people make jokes about, and allows half the world to sympathise with each other’s pains, whilst gently chiding or not-so-gently antagonising the other half. Finally, it is the one about which the most advice (rightly or wrongly, volunteered or otherwise) is given, and, finally it is believed to be the source of over 90% of the happiness or sadness that a person will experience over the course of their life (this last one I believe to be true).
And this is just one. The others are also important, and also have their own changes, stresses, and problems. I am not disregarding these.
Ruminating on this has made me determined to succeed at all of my relationships. Someone has to. And as I was thinking of this, and the way of going ahead with this. I came across a tumblr-y quote:
“Fix your relationship with Allah, and He will fix your relationship with others”
Perfect, right? If anyone has a reference for this, please do let me know.
With duas
I
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Because if you’re going to begin with Twitter, you should end with Tumblr, and cut out Facebook altogether. It just makes logical sense.
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* Ghina is haraam. For definitions of what falls under Ghina, ask your Marj‘a.
** One thing that really, really disturbs me is when a newly-betrothed girl just posts lovey-dovey stuff on her social media all day long. It’s as if she doesn’t have an identity or existence outside of being part of a couple. Has this always been the case and social media has just made me aware of it? Or is this a recent phenomenon that social media has just amplified?
