Perhaps the most frustrating but also the most irrevocably liberating realization I came to this year is that people are so different & that this relentless trend of advice that tries to generalize human behavior into absolute tenets really does not compute. “People like the chase” actually some do and some don’t “people like unavailability” some do and some don’t “if they don’t initiate first they’re not interested” actually people express interest differently. People are simply different. I need to enforce this in my brain every day bc it’s so lucrative to simplify relationships down to these unspoken rules but thinking it can ever be this simple is a mirage
I can understand how pop psychology like this can be tempting. I genuinely reached such a point of burnout w dealing w people last year, that it became a mental relief to just subscribe to thinking that there are some non negotiables I had to follow to form a successful relationship w people—that non negotiables existed & gave me “secret” to how people work. But regardless of how much psych you dig into (or how many tiktoks you watch tbh) it will always stand that whatever you absorb can never be applied to everyone you meet in sweeping statements. It simply does not work that way
My brain also very much deals in analogies, so I used to make this make sense by telling myself stuff like “if it’s an absolute truth that smoking is bad for everyone, absolute statements can also be applied about human behavior” but like…. It just doesn’t translate that well when it comes to human behavior. I think at most a concession can be made for like. Ubiquitous survival instincts. But pop psychology takes this too far to the point where all human behavior can be generalized into these rigid rules that truly don’t take into account the variegated human experience
