Sunday Open Thread — Living and Dying on What Others Think of Us, and on What We Do Together

But it’s clear that, like everyone else, I crave attention and appreciation. Just like all the blog writers who face the long, uncertain and lonely process of building up an audience. Just like the Second Life (and First Life) denizens who long for partnership, for conquest, for “just one minute of real love“.

As Patti explained in her recent post, it’s amazing how fear and insecurity drives what we feel and do. And there is no greater fear than that of being alone, unloved, ostracized by those with whom we presume to share community. No wonder then that tyrants, manipulators, marketers, psychopaths and predators exploit our fears, tell us that if we don’t do and feel and think what they want, if we don’t become “everybody else”, we won’t get the attention and appreciation we crave — we will be alone.

We express our love for others not by saying “I love you” but through giving attention and appreciation to those we love, by doing something for others. This is why love has been such an evolutionary success: It gets things done. This is wonderful when the recipient of our love wants and values and reciprocates it. When it’s rejected it’s devastating. Just ‘being’ in love is impotent, hermetic, useless.

The challenge with online communities is that it’s harder to know, every day, what you’re doing for others. You have to rely on them to tell you, over and over, because they can’t show you how much your attention and appreciation does for them, gives them. That’s why I think so many consider online communities insufficient, and insist that the “song of a warm, warm body” is needed to convey and achieve real love, real conversation, real community. Second Life, and video/audio/IM conversations at least get halfway, because they’re multimedia (more sensory clues, in the diagram at right) and real-time. But still…

Still, we live and die on the attention and appreciation we get when we give attention and appreciation to others. My heart soars when the smile I give to a stranger on the subway is returned. I feel delight when the flirtatious remark I give to another at a party, or in an IM discussion, or in a chance meeting in Second Life, is reciprocated.

I am more alive when I hear the whisper of one I love in my ear, telling me what she loves about me. When my comment provokes nods, “yes…and” responses, joyful laughter and warm smiles. When someone I love pushes me down and climbs on top of me for the pleasure she knows, and I know, I can give her. When a conversations suddenly becomes intimate as two of us spark with “aha” realizations, learning from each other, discovering things we already knew but suddenly become clear, thrilling, full of astonishing promise.

When I share an experience, a moment of appreciation of something important, valuable, beautiful with others — a sunset, a quotation that bristles with meaning, a sudden caress, a turn of phrase, a compliment, the view from a mountaintop, the smell of rain, the taste of fresh-picked berries, the sound of a cathedral choir — these are so much more powerful than when they are experienced alone. These are life-changing moments of connection, so rare and important. We can never get enough of them.

I can understand, from an evolutionary point of view, why such moments of mutual attention and appreciation, and shared attention and appreciation, are selected for, and essential to us, filling an insatiable empty space in us. What will forever fill me with awe is how such moments and our search for them can drive us to such incredible heights and lengths, of courage and self-sacrifice and infidelity and sheer madness. And, when they are missing, to equally incredible depths of despair.

Of course we are social creatures — it is to our benefit to be so. But why, and how, can we live and die so much on what others think of us that everything else becomes grey, empty, meaningless? And how can we learn, for our own well-being and that of those we love, and that of those we will never meet but who will be touched in turn by those we love, to be better and more generous at giving and receiving attention and appreciation? If we could all learn to transform our world’s terrible attention deficit and scarcity of appreciation into one of abundance,is there anything we could not then achieve?