What Do People Actually Want?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Friday, May 2, 2025 23:09
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What Do People Actually Want? Doctor Irvin D. Yalom asked them. He got answers.
PROLOGUE
Imagine this scene: three to four hundred people, strangers to each other, are told to pair up and ask their partner one single question, “What do you want?” over and over and over again.
Could anything be simpler? One innocent question and its answer. And yet, time after time, I have seen this group exercise evoke unexpectedly powerful feelings. Often, within minutes, the room rocks with emotion. Men and women—and these are by no means desperate or needy but successful, well-functioning, well-dressed people who glitter as they walk—are stirred to their depths. They call out to those who are forever lost—dead or absent parents, spouses, children, friends: “I want to see you again.” “I want your love.” “I want to know you’re proud of me.” “I want you to know I love you and how sorry I am I never told you.” “I want you back—I am so lonely.” “I want the childhood I never had.” “I want to be healthy—to be young again. I want to be loved, to be respected. I want my life to mean something. I want to accomplish something. I want to matter, to be important, to be remembered.”
So much wanting. So much longing. And so much pain, so close to the surface, only minutes deep. Destiny pain. Existence pain. Pain that is always there, whirring continuously just beneath the membrane of life. Pain that is all too easily accessible. Many things—a simple group exercise, a few minutes of deep reflection, a work of art, a sermon, a personal crisis, a loss—remind us that our deepest wants can never be fulfilled: our wants for youth, for a halt to aging, for the return of vanished ones, for eternal love, protection, significance, for immortality itself.
It is when these unattainable wants come to dominate our lives that we turn for help to family, to friends, to religion—sometimes to psychotherapists.
Download the book by Irvin D. Yalom Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy from the mirror at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Irvin+D.+Yalom+Love
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Asking "successful, well-functioning, well-dressed people who glitter as they walk" what they want is likely to to generate metaphysical answers. Asking a woman in impoverished Africa will probably get a different set of answers:
I want to go to bed with a full stomache.
I want to stop shitting from my vagina.
I want my child to survive this illness.
I can't speak for African men. IDK what drives them to mine in illegal mines or join gangs.
Maybe he should try this exercise with different sets of people.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Reading this thread for the past day or 2, I was thinking about Indigenous attitudes.
For legal immigrants, they would strive to integrate into the colonies, USA. They wanted to blend in, meld into the melting pot of USA.
Natives did not want to integrate with the invading white man - why would they? And they resisted.
These attitudes are opposite each other.
One group wanted to retain their culture, while the other wanted to start anew in a new land, and was more willing to leave their culture behind.
JSF that idea of assimilation is what caused the Indian Wars in the US.
Not to say that didn't happen in Canada. It did but mostly in the east with the Iroquois Confederation. In the west it was the Metis. Louis Riel was the leader of the Metis who was fighting for a Metis homeland. The Metis like all the Nations in Canada just wanted to be able to practice their culture which was derived from taking traditions from their European fathers and mixing them with mainly their Cree heritage.
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Quote:How about you stop talking about massive failure in lands living without civilization? (Owning a smartphone is not the same as living in civilization, Signym.) Signym, in a country that has not fallen into chaos, your real "Wants" are:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Asking "successful, well-functioning, well-dressed people who glitter as they walk" what they want is likely to to generate metaphysical answers. Asking a woman in impoverished Africa will probably get a different set of answers:
I want to go to bed with a full stomache.
I want to stop shitting from my vagina.
I want my child to survive this illness.
I can't speak for African men. IDK what drives them to mine in illegal mines or join gangs.
Maybe he should try this exercise with different sets of people.
Quote:Signym, there is a do-it-yourself fix for "progressive atomization". It is called friends. Making friends is a different do-it-yourself fix than Buddhist-style meditation, which is for mitigating existential crisis. Siddhartha Gautama, a.k.a. The Buddha, naturally fell into such a crisis, and so can anyone, but not so many climb out.
Well, did we ever have a national sense of belonging? Recent immigrants and their children probably feel isolated to some extent ... not that there's much "there" there when it comes to culture and community, or even family, here. It's not something the USA elites want valued. In fact, they've been working on atomizing our society (progressive atomization) for over 100 years.
Most ppl don't think even society exists, or should exist.
How to have friends past age 30
A quick and simple guide.
By Noah Smith | Apr 25, 2025
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-to-have-friends-past-age-30
“And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split”
— Bob Dylan
One thing I am good at is having friends. Not everyone knows this about me, but in fact I’ve always been an extremely social person. I’m pretty good at assembling a cohesive group of friends, who do things together regularly and become friends with each other. And at least since my college days, I’ve also had quite a number of very close friends — people I can tell anything, people I know will have my back, some who feel as close as family.
Apparently this is somewhat unusual for an American man in this day and age — or at least, more unusual than it ought to be.
But anyway, here’s how I do it. More at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-to-have-friends-past-age-30
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wow, the most unpleasant guy on the inlet, the one who hates half of the people and who looks down on EVERYONE, the lying sociopath, is giving advice on how to make friends????
A sense of belonging occurs on many levels... family, neighborhood, work, culture, religion (if you have one), nation. "Friends“ hardly encompasses the scope.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, I think you are not making friends with your sympathy for Russia's reasons to annihilate Ukraine.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, the most unpleasant guy on the inlet, the one who hates half of the people and who looks down on EVERYONE, the lying sociopath, is giving advice on how to make friends????
A sense of belonging occurs on many levels... family, neighborhood, work, culture, religion (if you have one), nation. "Friends“ hardly encompasses the scope.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=12174
66#1217466
Signym, you are not making friends with your antipathy toward USAID, which Trump has shut down and caused starvation and death.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=66397&mid=12174
67#1217467
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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SECOND- First you say I'm poor. Then you think I have plastic body parts, and my car crashed. Now you're worried about my friendship quotient?
You're weird.
I think you're just poking around, looking for a defensive response.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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So, on a substantive level ... when TPTB are busy taking your connections apart, bit by bit ... potraying an atomized, hostile society on the media over and over; advertising consumption as the key to happiness; breaking family, community, religious, and national connections...
"Do it yourself making friends" ain't gonna reverse that trend. The opposite ... connected families, helpful neighbors, national consensus really needs to be modeled on the media.
I can see what's pulling people apart by watching what pulls them together. My extended family NOW lives within a few miles of each other, having lived in separate states while working. It was the search for better paying jobs that pulled them apart. My sis lives in a settled neighborhood, which has been fortunate not to have experienced either a housing boom or bust, so never had people moving in, trading up, moving out. There is one die-hard MAGA family in a sea of moderate Dems. Originally they were hostile to the whole neighborhood, but now even THEY participate in the neighborhood system of helping each other plow out/ snowblow out after a big snowfall.
All of this moving about ... doesn't help people stick together.
The original welfare system, denying $ if there was man about the house, the intrusive snooping around ... THAT drove families apart. Maybe there should be tax breaks for intact families. Maybe there should be local tax breaks depending on how long a person has lived at a particular residence.
And, of course, if there were good-paying jobs and decent services (mail, electricity, doctors) everywhere... no "rust belt" cities or abandoned rural communtites... there would be fewer reasons for people to leave. As it is now, people joke that Buffalo is a good place to be "from". But -aside from blizzards and lack of good paying jobs- it's a good place to live.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:An entire neighborhood overflowing with Anti-America, Freedom Hating Libtards? And the one reasonable family was the ostracized one?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
My sis lives in a settled neighborhood, which has been fortunate not to have experienced either a housing boom or bust, so never had people moving in, trading up, moving out. There is one die-hard MAGA family in a sea of moderate Dems. Originally they were hostile to the whole neighborhood,
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Quote:That's what happens when you're a raisin in a bowl of oatmeal.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:An entire neighborhood overflowing with Anti-America, Freedom Hating Libtards? And the one reasonable family was the ostracized one?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
My sis lives in a settled neighborhood, which has been fortunate not to have experienced either a housing boom or bust, so never had people moving in, trading up, moving out. There is one die-hard MAGA family in a sea of moderate Dems. Originally they were hostile to the whole neighborhood,
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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