Do we really ‘see’ other people, or just a simulacrum of them? Do we perceive real beings, or are those that we pass in the street every day mere phantoms, cutouts who we imbue with our own imaginations and prejudices?
I’ve spent a lot of today on a train, surrounded by people who I didn’t speak to and who I will never see again. Such is modern, atomised life. I take my seat in a metal tube, read my iPhone or my Kindle, and I don’t talk to the other human beings around me.
(For the most part. Unless I happen to be doing game, of course).
In the corridor I saw an old woman behind me, struggling to push her case along in front of her. She was a typical Russian ‘babushka’—hair in a quiff dyed a bright orange colour, and an overzealous application of deathly-pale makeup.
I offered to help her, but she and her friend, another babushka, impatiently shoo-ed me away. These girls were proud, and they didn’t want some metrosexual Brit butting in.
I walked on. And as I did so it occurred to me that I had hardly ‘seen’ the women at all. I’d shot a quick glance at them, my brain had calculated ‘babushka’ and that was it.
There was no further enquiry or consideration on my part at all.
Not that I want to be self-lacerating. We have finite resources. We can’t be expected to seek a backstory for every random stranger we come into contact with.
But it struck me that if I am like this with the babushkas, it’s likely that I am like this with others too.
Probably I am like it with the girls that I meet.
I encounter her on the street. ‘Cute girl’, I think. Do I enquire any more deeply than that? In most cases probably not—unless we start dating.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter very much. Perhaps it is a necessary function of modern life that we don’t consider others too deeply. After all, we meet far more people than our primordial ancestors ever did. We can’t be expected to process all the data that gets thrown at us.
Except I am also conscious that the greatest moments life has to offer are those where we do achieve communion and connection with others. Where we do reach beyond the superficial and get to know the real individual beneath.
Perhaps it is a negative aspect of the ‘bachelor’ lifestyle that, in meeting far more new people than the average Joe, our relationships are at the same time be necessarily more shallow.
I don’t know. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
But I do think it’s ironic that an activity that was supposed to make me more sociable has in some ways made me less so.
This, of course, is where the stereotype of the ‘sociopathic player’ comes from—the man entirely bereft of feelings and emotions who simply uses others for his own pleasure.
But much as I might play up my nihilistic tendencies on social media, the truth is that I am absolutely the opposite of that template. Which is why I try to establish an empathetic human connection with everyone I come into contact with.
The fact that I perhaps fail more than I succeed is unfortunate. But we are all just works in progress. And we only change through a tortuous process of experience, self-discovery and practice.
To book daygame coaching with Troy this April email troy@realtroyfrancis.com
To own all 9 of Troy’s dating / game books for just $35 (full value $250) go here
To learn more about modern dating go here.
