Motives

There are different levels of intimacy. People who we are really intimate with. Our life partner, children, parents, siblings, close friends... We have observed them, know them for a very long time. We can predict how would they react in certain situation (and therefore, we know the buttons that we make them angry, happy or sad). These are people in our personal, private circle. One may have anywhere from 1-20 of such people in our life. This relationship require time investment.  And hence, we need to kick someone out to get in a new person, unless keeping secrets are our full time job. 

Then there is another group who we know at social settings. It could be our colleagues at work. Our cousins we  meet on family functions. We know a part of their personality at certain situations in life. We can have any number of these people. This number vary with how social we are. 

 Then there are people who we know through their public profiles. Celebrities, politicians, famous personalities.... We know a lot about them through media, thorugh their interviews, books etc.. Some of their lives seems to be so open and we would get the impression that we know them as close as people in our private circle. In machine learning terminology, all these people are training sets for our brain. Based on there appearance, facial expression in different situations, responses, attitudes, our brain create various mental images and would try to predict the personality of new people we meet. When I used to travel in train, I would try to predict the personality of other passengers in the same isle, as a pastime. In fact, we all paint a mental picture about new person we meet. What kind of person this. Is she social or recluse? Is he judgemental or open minded? Is she an extrovert or introvert? 

I was talking to a friend of me, who is in counseling profession requiring close interaction with many many people. He told me how people always surprise them with the stories they tell. Almost always, his predictions are proven to be wrong. This usually happen with public figures. The images project to the public are carefully curated pictures of people. Most of these pictures are only minimally true. Almost everyone has a hidden personality, many time this is hidden from everyone, including the person himself/herself. This person is a strange, unrecognizable being, unless we pay very close attention to ourself. Once we get deeper into therapy or meditation, we get a glimpse of this. That person will tell us why do we do what we do. We do to get approval, acknowledgement, satisfy a need that was created in childhood by this experience. Once we start getting to see this hidden person in each of us, we will be more conscious in our action. We can stop reacting, and start responding to life events. We can be more at peace with ourself.