The Importance of Being Social

The Importance of Being Social

Humans are social creatures. We have understood this about ourselves for ages. It is said that a baby bereft of human interaction will die, in fact a 1944 experiment in the US proved as much. Adults who spend any amount of time in solitary confinement suffer intense psychological trauma.  But why?

The Infinite You is not so much a discreet entity as it is an amalgam of interconnected, supported, and supporting, cohesions of other energies. A drop in an ocean, and an ocean in a drop. Evaporate too much and all you have a muddy puddle.

To continue with the radio analogy: imagine all these different radios as having different styles of speakers. When you put them together playing the same music, and in the right ways, the sound becomes not only louder, but clearer too. Deep bass, crisp highs, the works. The individual sound is fine until you have heard the chorus, then you know there is something not right.

Your Individual Consciousness relies on this connectivity, without it we are fundamentally weakened. The countless Local Meshes and Interconnected Consciousnesses ultimately make us who we are. We can affect the strength of this connectivity be engaging in various activities that we divide into two groups:

Active Social

Things like talking with friends or family over a meal, playing a video game with a group of friends, going for a bike ride in the park with someone, or any other activity where we directly interact with others. These activities are primarily how we develop and maintain The Local Mesh. The mesh is critical for our long-term mental health as without it we lose too much energy over the long term.

Being intimate falls into this classification as well, but sex is such an important part of social interaction that it deserves it’s own post.

Passive Social

Passively social activities are anything you share as a group, even if you are not interacting directly with someone else. Anywhere where other people are doing similar things together. Things like watching a movie in a busy theater (or better yet outside in a park), going to a busy outdoor shopping center, or visiting a museum.

One of the best passively social activities is going to a concert. Which can be a singularly enlightening experience. Tens of thousands of Individual Consciousnesses all nearly perfectly synced to the same music, eliciting similar emotions reinforced by each others emotional reactions. Most of the “noise” of our internal thoughts all replaced by the same, or at least exceedingly similar, thoughts guided by the music.

The “Concert” has been an integral part of our existence for most of our evolution. It comes in many forms: drums around a fire, story telling of myths and legends, all qualify.

While Passive Social activities don’t have long lasting effects on the Mesh (unless you went with friends or made new friends), it does serve to feed energy into the The Infinite You. In the end energy is what ultimately makes us US.

What about the digital age?

Funny thing about each new technology we come up with. We always say: “That will be the end of society” We said that about the telephone, about the tv, etc. Of course no such thing happened…. However, the digital age might be the most damaging, but for a much more profound reason. Read: The Digital Dark Age (coming Soon)

Can The Infinite You exist alone? Technically yes, though one formed without any connection wouldn’t have consciousness as we understand it. It would be far too weak and our brains have evolved to depend on a certain level of feedback, so a modern human would not survive long with such an underdeveloped consciousness.