H06 Love Principle

Which do you trust as a better guide for your life?

Fend for yourself and not give others the chance to hurt you.

OR

Spead more love to others to attract more meaningfulness in life.

Anankelogy

Anankelogy takes a penetratinginterest in how love brings satisfying meaning to our lives. Love as a broad subject can be challenging to define for empirical study. Anankelogy focuses on an empirical aspect of love best defined as “honoring the needs of another as much or more than honoring one’s own needs”. As independently observable behavior, such acts of love can be empirically measured.

The more you’re loved and experienced yourself as valued, the more of your needs can resolve. The more your needs resolve more fully, the better you can function. Hence, this empirical way to measure love’s expression correlates with improved wellness.

Anankelogy defines wellness as improved functioning resulting from resolved needs. Conversely, a lack of wellness reduces functioning as a consequence of unresolved needs. Both can be empirically measured, as independently observable phenomena.

Knowing you had a meaningful hand in enabling others to more fully resolve their needs can profoundly resolve your deeper need for reaching more of your full potential. Or akin to what positive psychology calls self-actualization. You position yourself to connect deeper with life.

You then open up yourself to receive other’s support for your pressing needs. You find empowering purpose in the natural pain endured when resolving needs. You transcend material distractions to realize a pantheon of existence well beyond your tactile senses. You encounter a richer sense of joy in simply being. You find yourself ecstatically at-one with the universe.

Need-response

Life bombards us with many temporal things repeatedly distracting us from meaningful connection and deeper social love. Alarms should sound when you expect to depend on others more than others can depend on you.

The more your daily life pulls you into satisfying the impersonal expectations of others, the more you naturally yearn for some reciprocation. The more you acquiesce to the demands of social norms to serve the expectations of others, especially when at odds with your overlooked needs, the more you understandably expect others to do their share.

The more people you interact with in your social surroundings, the less you can know their specific needs. You naturally defer to social norms and written laws. But such norms cannot help you forge meaningful connections with others.

Love can. Social love takes you beyond the minimal expectations of social norms. Such love propels you to support other’s needs, instead of mere harm reduction or easing pain. Such love inspires you to remove the common cause for pain, which is unresolved needs.

Reactive Problem

Alienating social norms frequently interfere with engaging social love. How can you honor the needs of others if you only comply with minimal standards that neglect their specific needs?

The more our social norms become normalized as the preferred guide for social interactions, the easier we fall prey to toxic legalism. Such legalism dilutes the potency of love.

• Distracting hyper-individualism. Legalism tends to prioritize each other’s self-interests over common interests, which easily alienates you from the potential support of others. You’re supposed to fend for yourself as others fend for themselves. Legalism favors individualism over a sense of community or commonly shared bonds.

• Distracting hyperrationality. Legalism incentivizes you to guard your vulnerabilities behind a veneer of rational sounding arguments. You defend yourself self-righteously instead of humbly and vulnerably engaging each other’s affected needs. You keep your guard raised, so no one can come close and inspire you with their love.

• Distracting overgeneralizing. Legalism tries to keep things relatively simple, for easier cognitive processing. You risk accepting such watered-down versions as true, despite disconfirming details. Confirmation bias pulls you into tunnel vision. The more these oversimplifications relieve your emotional pain, the more you likely conclude they represent the truth.

• Distracting avoidance. Legalism privileges stayingalienated from each other, to avoid getting to know what each other specifically needs. You repeatedly miss opportunity to meaningfully contribute to another’s needs as you remain stuck in the pain of your isolation. Your unprocessed pain disconnects you from life and its potential meaningfulness.

• Distracting adversarialism. Legalism encourages you to oppose others as presumed foes who can’t be trusted, unless fearing your asserted rights with threats of punishment for presumed wrongdoing against you. Such broad stroke opposition limits your potential to spread love.

In short, such legalism spreads antilove. And easily perpetuates anti-wellness.

Responsive Solution

Engage. Replace legalistic adversarialism with mutual regard for each other’s inflexible needs. The more you can endure the uncomfortable challenges in getting to know each other better, the more meaning you can find in absorbing such intense pain. You chase pain instead of letting pain chase you.

Engage! Find out what others specifically needs, to earn their trust to engage your affected needs. Dissolve alienation by offering an act of simple kindness. Step outside of your shell to show others how it can be done. Reach out to those you trust can appreciate it, to encourage you to give more.

ENGAGE! Hold influential people accountable with the greater authority of engaging love. Negate the suffocating hold of legalism by going beyond legal standards to address real needs. Earn the trust of others in ways legalist authorities never can. Bring out more of your life’s purpose by affirming their inflexible needs despite how they address them. Do for them what no one has dared offer before.

While others remain in the shallow levels of legalistic reasoning, you ascend to the higher plane of meaningfully improving lives. You raise the standard to empirically measurable improved wellness.

You connect more deeply with others as you enable them to resolve more of their needs, so they can meaningfully improve their level of functioning, their wellness. You bring out the best in them. You allow others to bring out the best in you.

You spread love. And let yourself feel amazed at the blossoming of meaningful purpose such love brings out in us all. One loving act at a time.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• How do you express love to others who refuse any overtures of kindness or affection?

• I find many are too self-absorbed in their pain to even realize I am socially loving them.

• I look back on time when others tried to be kind to me and I didn’t know how to take it.

• What about the trauma many of us suffer and simply cannot trust others to give us love?

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.