431 words (~2 minute read)
i believe this effect to explain questions such as:
prepare for my super hot very spicy take: isolation is really bad. like sooooooooooooooooooooo bad. the individualism our culture encourages warps the shit out of our social behaviors and instincts. this is not news.
what this means though is that we are starved of a natural sense of community, intimacy, and everything in between. we have primal needs to feel seen and heard, and we are continuously malnourished.
the thirsty wanderer that follows mirage after mirage until they exhaust themself is a manifestation of the phenomenon in which we project our malnourishments onto the environment and people around us—really we project all our emotions onto our surroundings and reality itself. our subjective experience is not just colored by our emotions but defined by them. see confirmation bias: our subconscious tendency to look for evidence to support our preconceptions instead of looking to form new theories from objective evidence. objectivity, unfortunately, cannot exist through a subjective lens. and thus it does not exist in the human realm.
what is the consequence of projecting a need for intimacy and companionship externally? it gets very hard to form pure friendships, or even decipher how you feel about someone. when i'm starving, i can't focus very well, and anything edible sounds good to me. i feel that this same pattern applies to intimacy, at least in men conditioned to pursue their romantic and sexual interests, which is the only group i can somewhat speak for (because can you ever really speak for a whole group??? no. definitely not.).
when i'm lacking intimacy, which is most of the time as a single person, i look for it everywhere—it's next to impossible for me to meet a new person without first contemplating my potential to be interested in them. and then that's the lens through which my brain contextualizes them until it can make a decision. typically it never reaches a verdict, fluctuating constantly based on my general state of being (read: everything).
when i'm in a period of life with strong community and regular access to people i love, these problems aren't so pervasive. but since marinating in the independent adulthood that the Western world seems to want for me, they are. and by pervasive i mean they aren't so troubling, not that they don't influence me.