"People are not linear. People are weird. They're difficult. They never say what they really think about you. You never know what they're thinking. And if you enter the work world and it's all political and people have their egos, you can take it personally and get very upset and you can get emotional. It can ruin your life. So I want you to think of understanding people as a skill as necessary as learning business, as learning anything in life. And the only way you're going to learn about people is by interacting with them. If you're too virtual, if you're doing everything on your phone, you're not interacting with people, that skill will atrophy."
— Robert Greene
What It Means to Us as Humans
Human beings are naturally messy and hard to read, which can easily stress us out if we take their moods personally. To survive and thrive, we have to treat "getting people" like a real skill that needs constant practice, not just something we're born with. If we spend all our time hiding behind screens, we lose the sharp instincts needed to handle real-world relationships. Ultimately, real connection only happens when we put down our phones and actually talk to each other face-to-face, to have a real conversation.
This is something that I always walked away from. The only real connections I ever made are now broken, the person I saw as my strongest ever pillar has disappeared and now it has pushed me back to the state I was before. But this time its worse, because earlier I didnt quite feel the pain, and now it hurts. She once had asked me if there is anything that she had changed in me, that question made me sad that day and even today when I think about it because it meant she couldnt see the effect she had on me. There are many small things that I continue to do that I started doing when she was around, that I learnt from her. Truly experiencing the emotion is only one piece of the puzzle she helped me solve.
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Truly Madly Deeply