Interest

Interests are so important. It can come in all forms, like hobbies, like likes and dislikes, like passions.

Jx once told me it is the interest in people that keeps our fire alive. Very valid. Like Mr Hitler who has lost all interests in people. He even denied the evacuation of civilians in his very own Berlin during the Third Reich. Expendables, he said. He only cared about his so called "empire". He forgot what his empire was made up of in the very first place. No, it wasn't soil.

We fail to function if we lose interest in people. We are social animals after all, that is why there is a 1719 Robinson Crusoe, showing how wrecked life can be without belonging to a society. We hang at the edge of the cliff if we live alone, because we will be pushed to the sides as there will be no space for nonchalent and self-centred folks. Not true, you might say, because we are all self-centred. But I beg to differ, because I believe we all have the ick factor, and it has nothing got to do with any religion.

Because we all picture a Utopia, a perfect society, a perfect nation-state. We all have an idea of an ideal world. We all know what it is. So Kelvin, Charlene wasn't so wrong in believing in a happy world after all.

Sounds like a view about the two-sided coin. But you also can't be absolutely sure that there aren't any absolutes in this world.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about in the first place. Interest is the category. Interest in people is the subject. I find myself losing a life, that is the topic.

Just wanna say that it is actually quite tiring to be interested in people. That is why I like the cup analogy, that the cup cannot be always pouring else it will be emptied soon: people needs to be interested in us, in me too. That is how relationships work, it is always an "if and only if" arrow.

It's not about losing fire, it's about being tiring that is all. Because humans differ from each other so much, there is so much to know about a person. In fact, I once heard that there is so much information about one person's life that a detailed biography written about any one person can easily have a thickness likened to the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Maybe it is exaggerated, but it sounds prodigious enough.

People get hurt when we dunno enough about them, but some get offended when we know too much about them. We do have a 3.6 terabyte capacity brain, I wonder how many person's worth of information is that? I do forget things like names, and I just did today at vivocity pet shop.

And that is not putting in the considerations for the emotions and reactions invoked from knowing about one person. Even a simple "Life Transformers" episode can make my eyes well up, it is even more tormenting to suffer the emotional affections of those closer to me. The Stoics thinks that it is only natural that we stand up more for the people nearer to the centre in the concentric circle of relationships, while Martha Nussbaum thinks that we should be cosmopolitan citizens who seek to draw the concentric circles closer to the centre. I think that is a most excruciating thing to do. Jesus took all the pain of sin for all the people in this world, before, present and in the future. It will take someone more than Jesus to collectively take all the emotions and all the experiences that ever occurred in this world. That is like attempting to travel faster than the speed of light.

I am a human after all. I judge some people, I hate some people. I finds some thoughts juvenile, I hate surface talks. I despise circumstance-driven actions, I abhor mindless freaks who do not have an opinion, yet at the same time I abominate opinionated people (I ought to dislike myself) too. I disdain irresponsible people who on the contrary likes to be in charge, and I nauseate when there are people who thinks that they are special. You might say everyone seek to be special, I say it is special to be normal, since everyone is special. Round argument, whatever. But the point is, I am only a imperfect inhuman, therefore it is really a quest to be like Jesus. Maybe it is because of the difficulties to be like Him that turn people to atheism. After all we do have a belief system of an ostrich, we sometimes choose not to see what is really there. We rather see sand.

That is why I find the lyrics of "Amazed by You" very apt:
So many times my faith grows weak
And so many times you're the last one I seek
I don't know what you see in me.
(Yup, it's Janice and Sonia again)

That is why I think that ideals will always remain as ideals. But we should all try to work towards the ideals nonetheless, and be the somewhere-in-betweens. Yes, I am one of those confused ones who is absolutely sure that there are no absolutes in this world.