Hello, puzzled soul!
I think that it’s not an assumption, but a fact that we act different in presence of different people. I’ve made that expirience myself that I was different with people whom I don’t know well. It depends of kind of people. Sometimes you meet someone and it makes a “click” in your head and you think :“damn it seems like I’ve known the person before.” But to be yourself with everyone is not really possible, because not everyone is ready to accept you how you are and you try to impress certain people. Some people are real chameleons who tell you exactly what you want to hear.
But anyway, I would be carefull with chosing such a way. There are not many people who like me for who I am. But people who recognize your real ‘I’ are people with whom you can be yourself in my opinion.
A month ago I’ve found a person who seemed to me well educated and a superior to me. I didn’t try to impress him or anything of that kind. But after talking a couple of hours we got addicted to our discussions and I know that I can be myself with that person and that he accepts me like i am with all my positive and negative qualities and it feels really great
I am sure that you will find out for yourself who is the right one for you. Just try to be open minded, even if it’s hard sometimes and if many people don’t share your attitudes
I have to say this was one of the early questions that got me interested in philosophy.
I found that it wasn’t so much me being different around different people, but the fact that different people just brought out different aspects of my personality. Like when I’m with my friends, we joke and talk junk, while when I’m with my boss (i.e. clients that hire me to program stuff) I have a more reserved and business like approach to my conduct. Then when I’m writing on this board, I again change into someone who likes to sit in a room alone and ponder the world around me. You might say, I, by myself brings out another array of characteristics that even my closest friends have never seen, as there isn’t the opportunity to express them in a meaningful way. Who I am has as much to do with, who I’m with.
So, it could be asked then why does it seem some people are always the same no matter whom there with? I think it comes down to two things. Empathy & How we characterise (or label) the person or group we’re with.
Empathy, as I would use it in this circumstance would mean the ability to understand how best to act around this group or individual. So for Empathy to work we need to judge what way is best for our interactions with those people and we label them: Family, Friends, Lover, Stranger, etc. Whatever category the person falls into will drive how we act and react to them. But as we get to know them better we remove them from the simple and inaccurate stereotypical label we’ve place on them, into a more complete understanding of who they really are, well who they are around us anyway, as this evaluation process is also being done by them. Because this judgement is a two-way thing, sometimes the process is sped up by the fact that for whatever reason the other person does or says something, that immediately causes us to change how we label them. Or sometimes we act and there reaction again causes us to change our label of them. Well in my opinion that’s how I think it works.
Who you are is different to what you have become. Everyone has many personalities. The sane of us can control which one they are being at a particular point in time. What you are describing is the way you feel you need to become a different personality depending on what situation you are dealing with - be it when you’re socialising with different people or whether you’re a soldier in battle, whatever - which everyone has.
You have to adapt - thats what life does - but another thing life does is accept. So while all ur personalities develop, and you use different ones for different situations, there’s only one that develops in what you determine is the best way which you use the most which you come to accept is ‘you’. The other’s seem less like you beause they are less accepted since they are less used.
The personality you have defined as ‘you’ is in fact the personality you just feel most comfortable being and the one you have learnt to accept is you. When you grow up, all you are doing is learning and part of this is learning who you need to be. You observe character attributes and other ppl’s actions (such as being a certain way and speaking a language/communicating) from these other people that you feel you need to copy, and you mimic them - slowly forging a personality that you feel is right and gets u where u want to be in what u determine is the best way. The parent figures taking a big role in this as they are the most complete personalities that provide you with most refined character traits and your friends and a school learning environment taking a big role as being the most common situation you have to deal with.
You change less and less as you get older as what u have left to learn from around you is mostly learnt by the time you are a teenager and by that time you already have a very strong fundamental personality that you have accepted that will stay with you for the rest of your life, only very slightly changing relative to the severity of the situations you go through later in life.
Physically:
But then, the physical being you are termed as is just a combination of atoms that are constantly being exchanged with ur surroundings that make up the cells that make up your body which are constantly dying, so physically you are never the same person twice.
Pax Vitae:
I’ve learned some cool theories in my sociology lessons once.
We behave like the others expect us to behave and everyone of us has so called “social roles” like son, student, lover, business man etc.
And that every role of ours has its own functions etc. I believe that’s about it!
Whats all this about different personalities? Isn’t that called schizophrenia? Actually I believe that the alienation of mass society causes a split in peoples personality so that most people are suffering from an acute form of schizophrenia. I think what science doesn’t want us to see is that society is most likely the main cause of psychic illness. It instead wants us to feel like it is our fault if we have a disorder or that we are in some way defective. It is easier to deal with us that way. Again people are treated primarilly as things and not as people.
It’s just because people who definetly don’t fit into the society, try to impress the others and to act different and never show there real ‘I’, what’s really pity in my opinion. But shizophrenia is a splitting personality, that means you don’t only act different to be someone else, you’re splitting insider yourself (in your mind) and that’s much worse
Thanks for all the response guys, very appreciated!
xplicit^-mentioning social roles, this is another interesting topic relating to how one sees oneself. Many times I think we use the labels…yes to understand others, but to even understand ourselves. For example, depending upon the person, different labels are more important to how you see yourself in different stages of your life. And when you lose the ability to keep the label, changes in your life such as in a relationship you were a girlfriend or a boyfriend to someone and now that might no longer exist. Or as one grows older, once athletic but now their body no longer can do the things it once could do. This reminds me of the movie Iris…Iris Murdoch as a thinker and her losing the ability to think…extremely frustrating, I can imagine. But I suppose these are just all experiences in life and we have to find ways to deal with that which confront us.
and as result I want to say, no matter how many social roles you have, you should never forget yourself and never get stuck between your “roles”
As long as you don’t know how you are, how can you expect from the others to recognize your ‘I’?!
I mean it in general, that everyone of us should think who he/she really is.
Puzzled Soul,
reading your post I come to remember some important philosophers on this very topic. Berkeley, Spinoza, Locke, and Liebniz. Some will tell you that who you are is defined by a criteria of which one aspect is that you must feel a sense of ownership to that which you did in order for it to have been you. For example, if you were drunk and your friends told you that you went running down a residential street naked, and you remember this, but don’t feel it was you (or ‘like you’) then it wasn’t. Let me elucidate, it is you physically but not mentally and the above philosophers say who you are is defined by your mental experience (even though everything you experience you experience through you body).Another idea found in the above philosophers is that you are the sum of your memories, so anything you don’t remember isn’t really you.
Another evident idea is that some of your real you is barried deep within you dying to get out, suppressed if you will, and when the right situation or person comes along you feel this sense of your true self coming out - even though you may have never acted in that way before in your life.
If you’ve ever heard stories of the power of the mind, or mind over matter, and if you believe them, then it may help you to think about the things you want more deeply. Berkeley tells us that nothing exists but God and minds, everything (all matter) is just a projection or virtual reality that appears for us to see it but when no one is observing it then it ceases to exist. For those things that are needed to exist even without us observing them, are the things that God observes. It may be plausible that you need only think clearly enough about the type of guy you want, how you want each other to treat each other, truly imagine it, and it may come true. I am not an idealist, but I honestly believe that we don’t have the things we want because we are not imagining them clearly enough. In order to strengthen this idea for you, try to think back to your thinking about what kind of guy you want, write it down on paper and see what you get. Notice how much is missing. I for one, imagined in great detail the type of girl I wanted when I was quite young. Not kidding you, I met and began dating a girl with the exact things I had in mind, but the relationship was horrible because there were many factors I had never anticipated before. Now you can’t anticipate EVERY factor, but it may be good to set some guiding principles in your mind about the guy you want. For instance, after the above mentioned girlfriend I reformed my conception of the perfect girl, lo and behold I met her and began dating her. But again the relationship was proliferated with problems, again I saw where I had gone wrong.
Note: when I say guiding principle I don’t mean “I want a guy/girl who respects me” - what I mean is for you to have the guiding principle mentioned above, along with a clear understanding of what you mean by respect. There is also the problem that you may meet a guy who respects you but you can’t seem to respect him by his definition of ‘respect’.
It appears that you aren’t speaking about certain people as you say in your first sentence, but instead you are speaking of people you see as a candidate for an intimate relationship as you say in your last statement. So let me answer this way, I think you feel more like yourself when speaking or being around someone you are interested in because you are going after something, we tend to feel very alive when we are after something, when we have a purpose. It’s not necessarily anything to do with who you are, other than that you are a person like the rest of your species who feels good to go after things they want. For clarification, when I say ‘go after’ I don’t mean you are throwing yourself at him, nor do I necessarily mean you are flirting with him, but for you to see or to feel this relationship with this person going somewhere is enough for your mind to think that each minute is taking you closer to being with him - in a sense…do you agree?
I understand and too feel more like myself around a female whom I can identify with, share with on an intellectual as well as spiritual level. I also think attractiveness is an important guiding factor that acts as a magnet to bring us to others or vice versa. Finding someone attractive also makes you feel…tingly I guess, not sure what word to use. But attractiveness, in my opinion, should never be the sole or primary factor for being with someone, I think we have all made that mistake in our young years…or maybe even older years. Going for and having feelings for someone as you said… we feel the way we do around a person whom we are interested in because of our feelings/assumptions of what is important in a relationship. I think that is a good way to go, but we should always stay open minded to new ideas in relationships, since you can’t have everything figured out and they may help you to add or amend your values of what is important in a relationship in order to enhance, or in some unfortunate cases degrade, you original values.
so true so true, but isn’t this in itself facinating how people can have such an effect on us? And sometimes this even frustrates the hell out of me!
Magius-
Thanks for your thoughts as well…I really appreciate reading your posts and thoughts because of the amount of time you always seem to put into them. My approach has pretty much been something close to what you articulate, but I still don’t come across too many that match those “guiding principles” I seem to have. I often begin to doubt my own expectations wondering if I do not set the bar too high. But then I also think that I do not want to settle either. This is why I am alone. My choice ultimately.
I was “in love” once with this guy who didn’t treat me very well. I felt as if he failed to respect me because of what I perceived as some incosiderate actions on his part, but I always knew that he loved me in his own way, but again for some reason that wasn’t enough for me. (I also struggled with myself because of own issues with the discord between my emotions on the one hand and my reason on the other;knowing that I did not deserve to be treated that way and wishing that he wouldn’t do it or at the very least recognize what he was doing and just be sorry for hurting me.)
yes you are correct in that I do feel more like myself when my interest is sparked, but not only because I am attempting to go after something, which is certainly a factor; I see it as these certain people bring these things out in me. They challenge me to think almost (not that I need help there, usually I am doing too much of that anyway) but I find that my attraction to a person comes from their ability to make me think…enjoying the moment and feeling energized by the challenge. Attraction for me has never been just a physical one and I honestly believe that it is mostly mental. Of course, there has to be some similar shared values too, can’t have a relationship based purely on abstract thinking. But intellectual stimualtion seems to be a strong motivationg factor for how I see them.
I think the common misconception that people have about ideal partners is that you don’t look for this perfect ‘model’ person that is imposed on us from magazines and socially successful celebrity gossip, you look for the person that is most suited to you. There is no such thing as a person being too good for u or too bad for u, ppl are either right for you or wrong for u to different extents.
You can’t set the rungs too high, you set the rung at ur perfect person and u can do ur best to find them or someone as close to them as possible. However ‘unperfect’ you see urself to be, your perfect person is just as ‘unperfect’ by those same ‘model’ standards, but perfect to u and u perfect to them.
And in reference to ur thread question, the perfect person is one that makes u feel like you think you should be. And together you are compatible because you are comfortable and don’t need to fear any aspect of the other person’s character. Anything else that u look for in them is to do with person preference which Magius describes - u can’t know what that is until you get it. Until then its just really trial and error.
Silhouette, I think the “don’t say you, say I” rule should come in handy for you here. You seem to be able to say anything you want simply by denying to personalize it or take personal responsibility for it. I am looking for a queen and when I find her no man will be able to deny who or what she is.
A very good point. I totally agree with it. It’s like the saying goes :“the beauty lays in the eyes of the beholder”.
I also remember another saying about love:
“Do you love me because I am so beautiful?
Or am I so beautiful because you love me?”
I think that such emotions and feelings can change everyone and make them think different about themselves.
That goes not only for the females, also for males. I think if you don’t like yourself, how can you expect the others like you (your appearance).
And why only girls? Something will never change … and this something is this beauty- addiction.
I can’t lie, I like beauty and most of my girlfriends have been very attractive, but I am coming to see that the beautiful girls are the worst when it comes to romance, and the average looking ones are more fun.
Not that I am a feminist, but it’s not always like beauty = being b*tchy, in my opinion. Physical beauty matters, but I think the true beauty comes from the inside. What do you want to start with a person who looks like a top model, but with whom you have no common interests and you are all confused what you could talk with her about. Not that I didn’t like beautiful people myself. But beauty is very relative.
Actually I believe that the alienation of mass society causes a split in peoples personality so that most people are suffering from an acute form of schizophrenia. I think what science doesn’t want us to see is that society is most likely the main cause of psychic illness. It instead wants us to feel like it is our fault if we have a disorder or that we are in some way defective. It is easier to deal with us that way. Again people are treated primarilly as things and not as people.