Due to the secularization of the world, people see far fewer limits and inhibitions in the way of their personal largess.
As a result, loneliness has run rampant. This is a huge problem that society has not found a way to deal with quite yet.
Social media is not of particular use.
Meeting people in public is a dicey prospect because of the nature of the civil conflict that is rampant.
We also just have a lot of problems in terms of separation of generations and general alienation among social classes. There is no binding ethos to the world.
The world has gone off the rails in terms of limits and inhibitions.
I want to briefly discuss practicing depth conversations as an antidote to all of this loneliness. Depth relationships are of such tremendous use and importance considering what’s going on in the world today.
It’s not the easiest thing in the world to try.
People generally are made up of defenses that run one or two levels deep and they bounce back any sort of probes or search for vulnerability because they have been programmed to do so by the school system. The school system discourages people from binding to each other in any significant sense.
The first step to practicing a depth conversation obviously is to do it with yourself and this would involve some measure of healthy self-criticism.
Healthy self-criticism means looking at yourself from an outside perspective and thinking, “How am I getting in the way of my own happiness?”
“What am I doing wrong?”
“What am I listening to myself the least about?”
These are very pertinent questions to ask because they begin to unravel our defenses.
There is no doubting that emotional defenses are a pertinent and useful part of being in the world today.
We couldn’t survive without them, but in our private lives we want to peel back this armor, this emotional armor in order to understand ourselves better, gain a greater appraisal of our motivations, and come to understand how we may be getting in our own way.
As we further this conversation with ourselves and to the extent that we do, we generally catch on with other people.
Other people take interest in us because we have taken interest in ourselves and thus we can begin a conversation with other people who practice self-criticism in the healthiest sense possible, which is the self-knowledge sense. This is to be differentiated from neuroticism, which is a tortured self-consciousness borne out of childhood trauma – usually due to a parent who scrutinized a person unfairly and in a way that provoked discomfort which could not be readily and easily resolved.
