Motives

Understanding the motive for any action is always very difficult. Physics and Mathematics perhaps try to completely avoid such questions since here we are mostly happy at the stage of answering the "How?" and everytime we go near to answering "Why?" we console ourselfves by trying to give a general structure which will give the current question as a special case and hence we have morphed the question of "Why?" into searching for a larger structure.

But then unfortunately life is not simple. Here to survive we have to understand 2 different kinds of motives and there is no way we can avoid either of the questions for long ::

Q1. What is my motive for doing what I am doing ?
Q2. What is the other person's motive in doing what he/she is doing ?

Somehow I am a little fortunate since I can understand my motives for doing things very clearly. May be at times the motives are things which the rest of the worl will not agree to being a "good" motive. But then mostly my motives can be classified into the following types ::

a) Search for beauty either in the mortal sense or in the sense of an aesthetic theory.
b) Search for professional succcess and recognition.
c) Search for love or a deep relationship with someone.

Ofcourse its a different question as to how able I am in succeeding in these motives. I feel that inspite of my most sincere and hardest efforts even at the cost of my professional motives I have some fundamental inability or some kind of a blockade in succeding in my last motive. May be the answer lies in my genetic sequence or in my fate.

Similarly though I am more able in pursuing the first 2 motives but still my achievemnts have been far far below the critical value which would give me satisfaction. But then somehow most people believe that I am never going to attain that critical value. If they are true then ofcourse I have been written off by my life and I have been dumped by my fate.

I am consciously trying to avoid this terribly demotivating influence of these people.


Anyway at any rate what is most complex is the fact that I also need to understand the motives of other people's actions and the following issues confront me here ::

a) Most people are a bit too undecided about things and they themselves arent sure of their own motives and hence interacting with them gets really tough.

b) If the other person's motives are simply to harm me then the motive is easiest to detect.

c) If the other person is sincerely trying to help me then what becomes crucial to understand is the mental frame in which this other person is trying to help me which can be of the following types ::
1. That person feels that I am inferior to him/her and hence is lending me a favour.
2. That person is in some sort of a compulsion to help me.
3. That person is seekig some favour from me and hence is helping me.
4. That person is helping me as an equal with a collaborative attitude.

Unfortunately as we as human beings are evolving and becoming more sophisticated we have acquired greater and greater skills in hiding or disguising our motives. Especially people are becoming more and more capable in disguising the difference between the motives of the kind 1. , 2. and 3.

I feel that a critical analysis of human evolution and development will tell us that the stage of evolution human species are essentially characterized by one and only one factor ::
"our ability to disguise our emotions and motives"

People are scared to accept their faults and weaknesses and shirk from the possibility of being pointed out about them. Mostly people are scared to face the fact they need help and even more scared to face the fact that they might be under some compulsion. People seem to want to believe that they are living in a free world and that they are all doing what they want to do and enjoy. They seem to take the fact that they have lots of bindings and restrictions on them as an insult.

But as a result of all this one thing is surely becoming complex and that is interactions. One nevre knows whether one is seeing the real person or a guise. I feel scared to interprete and I am never sure whether the other person means what he/she is saying and whether I should belive or not. I feel that this world and the experiences of living in it have deeply impregnated in me a dictum of doubt :: "Doubt everything that you see around you"

It takes so much effort nowadays to even believe that the other person is happy when I see the other person smiling at me. Today there are so many different malicious reasons for a person to smile!

A world where even a smile cant be belived and I must exist in it.