Making a connection at Christmas

“You cannot connect with anyone

except through reality.”
― Stefan Molyneux

Christmas is a special time for many, whether Christian or not. It is a time when we reconnect with our primary community, our family and friends. We sit around a table to eat far too much food, share bad jokes and revel in the joy of being together. For some, who live away from their family, it is a chance to reconnect. Connection with our primary community of friends and family is at the very core of being human. We are an innately social species, because being social has been an evolutionary advantage over the ages of mankind. Some, however, do not have this primary community to connect with. Some live alone or have difficult relationships with their family or friends. So, it is especially important for us to reach out and connect with anyone we know in this position at Christmas and other times of the year as well. Being connected with others is very important.

As mentioned, in our deep history as a human race we have become social by necessity, but more recently we, as a human race, have developed an ironic behaviour that interferes with our ability to be social, this is the use of social media.  (I suppose there is also an irony in the fact that I am sharing this post on social media). Very often I sit around a table with friends and colleagues who are silently staring at their mobile phones, scrolling through various news feeds on social media. Several people can sit around a table and not even make eye contact with each other. This digital connection with online friends has become a barrier to real life connections with people we are physically with. It has become so endemic in society that it has become a social norm. This has meant that the trial and error of learning how to socialise with each other in person is becoming a lost art, because people are not practicing it.

We also only share on social media what we want others to see of ourselves,  in other words just the best bits of our lives. But our loves do not have filters on them and relationships are built on the good and the bad and navigating our way through these things. Making mistakes and concessions is the interplay of relationship building. We compare our lives of good and bad to the best bits of other people’s lives that they share online, making us feel that we have less worth than they do. We all have great worth that is not dependent on anyone else, we all have ups and downs in life and we all need support from our primary community, in good times and bad. So let’s put away our phones when we are spending time with others and connect with our eyes and our attention to make real world connections for a life lived more deeply.