I asked my friend today what the little things she likes in people are. She gave me two answers.
“They should be a good listener.”
“And they should remember stuff.”
Take a guess which one she’s good at. She forgot she’d made this exact complaint to me a week earlier, same dorm, same tone. I didn’t bring it up though. Some ironies are more useful left alone, secretly filed away for essays like this one. She wants from people exactly what she can’t produce herself, and doesn’t clock it. Not because she’s dumb, she’s one of the smartest people I know, but just because nobody audits their own wants that closely. Ask anyone the same question and you’ll get some version of this. A list of things they personally lack, dressed up as a compliment to other people. Ask enough people and it stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern you eventually get bored of.
I think about this a lot. How similar we all are underneath, how hard everyone works on the surface to look otherwise. The reflex to reject anything that looks clichĂ©, to do the opposite on purpose, hoping someone notices the unpredictability, the newness. This might annoy a lot of us to read, mostly because it’s true about us too. Irony on irony. I find it kind of funny, in the way you find something funny right before its not.
Back to my friend. Once I noticed the irony in her answer, the less funny part showed up behind it, the way it always does if you sit with something long enough. We like actions that serve us. We like being loved in the exact shape of our own gaps, and we call that shape âwhat I love in a personâ like it’s a value system and not a self-diagnosis. Nobody enjoys having that said out loud. It turns into denial, or offense, the second someone implies you might be a little self-interested without asking your permission to say so first. Try it sometime. Tell someone their taste in friends is basically a wishlist for what they’re missing. An obvious sense of discomfort would be there for both your friends and you. Thatâs how unfamiliar the feature is.
Self awareness. once you’ve had an unhealthy dose of it. It doesn’t leave. You stop being able to tell your original opinions apart from the ones subtly rewritten by insecurity. You start narrating your moments instead of just being in them, which in its own way is kind of exhausting, and frustratingly, the cost of noticing anything real about people in the first place.
There’s a manga, Bungo Stray Dogs: Two characters, Dazai and Dostoevsky, with near-identical minds, same read on human nature but one difference that ends up mattering more than everything they have in common. Dostoevsky decides people are selfish by design and concludes we’re better off dead, calls death the only real mercy available to something this flawed. Efficient, if you don’t think about it too hard. Dazai sees the exact same thing and goes: yeah, we’re selfish, sinful and a bit stupid. So what?
That “so what” is pretty much the whole point. My friend’s forgetfulness doesn’t cancel out her wanting to be remembered. It just means that once you see the selfishness under everyone’s preferences, including your own, you get to decide what to do with it. Treat it as an indictment. Or let it be true and keep loving the person and yourself anyway.
That second option is the thing I admire. People who’ve stopped needing to be selfless because they’ve stopped needing to hide that they’re not. Acceptance isn’t something you can explain your way into. Anyone who tries is proof they haven’t gotten there. You recognize it because you’ve felt it, or you just don’t recognize it at all. No extravagance of showcasing another big change. Just the decision that this part of you, selfishness and âsinfulnessâ included, is enough.
That’s the little thing.