Why care about people?
TLDR; Selfishness is hardwired, turn it into genuine curiosity about others, and you create deeper connections and a richer perspective on life.
WE ARE ALL SELFISH
One of the key things to understand about people is that every single one of us sees the world through our own lenses. We feel like we are the most important thing in this world. Everything revolves around us, should serve us, and we should be the stars at the center of the universe. Sometimes people put their own interests aside just so they can survive, so even then, they do it for their own good.
I’M A DOOMER?
This explains a lot of our behaviors as human beings. We do things and prioritize things around ourselves. This might sound like a doomer mindset, but the way I see it, I’m just trying to be a realist. You might disagree with me, but just hold on for a bit and treat this as a thought experiment and see for yourself if the rest of this post makes sense or not.
Kindness does exist, and people can care about each other. My goal with this post is to figure out a way to maximize this behavior, since it’s a win win, net positive thing for society.
MY TAKE
I believe you can utilize this feeling of self importance as leverage to become more altruistic, to get people to like you, and to create a better social environment.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
Based on our hypothesis, people love feeling important. To make the whole social experience positive, you need to give them that sense of importance. The trick is to feed your self importance while also feeding theirs. If you just try to listen to them and pretend to care, you’ll encounter two problems:
They’ll sense that you’re not being genuine.
It’s not always easy to get into what’s truly important to people.
BE GENUINE
The moment you start getting interested in other people’s lives, their interests, the tough times they’re going through, or even their silly stories, you’ll realize something important: their experiences are different from yours. You are two different people, so statistically, this is inevitable.
But what’s important to them is unique to them. By becoming interested in that, learning about it, and trying to understand it, you can bring valuable insights into your own world and make yourself better. That’s the key: you improve yourself by genuinely being curious about what other people are thinking and what matters to them on a personal level.
If you do this with many people, you’ll gain a richer perspective on life and reduce the repetitive or boring parts. Instead of living your entire life through your single, limited lens, you’ll expand your vision through theirs.
So being curious about people and trying to learn from them makes your interest more genuine. Yes, people can sometimes be boring, and it will require patience.
BE A TECHNICIAN
Then comes the hard part: filtering through the noise. When you try to get into other people’s lives and minds, some of what they share will be meaningless or superficial. Some people reveal what’s important to them very easily, even spontaneously. Others are more protective of what truly matters and won’t let you in right away.
There’s no magical trick here. The key is practice. Be curious about people as often as possible. Talk to a wide variety of people, make mistakes, iterate, and listen carefully. Read from different voices. Absorb as much as you can from diverse perspectives.
The more you do this, the better you’ll become at spotting what’s genuine, what’s not, what’s important, what’s trivial, and how people communicate it.