At this day and age, where everything is so instant and rapid, it’s easy to get lost in what it means to be truly connected with someone. You may have millions of followers on Instagram, thousands of people 'liking' your Facebook pictures, 500+ connections on LinkedIn, and still feel frantically distant and out of place in this world. It is even common for us to “network” with someone and obtain a palpable amount of knowledge on the other person’s background and interests through fieldwork done with the help of social media. With that being said, I do think that having good quality and genuine conversations, without any hidden objective is extremely rare. Gazing into someone’s eyes just to concentrate on the conversation is now considered “too intense”, and people who hug are now marginalized as being too touchy or flirty. Moreover, meeting someone in a bar or conversing with someone in a coffee shop is considered absurd, yet chatting with a person on tinder is considered acceptable. In this piece, we will unravel what connection is, what it means to be connected and how to adapt to this new capricious way of connecting without losing the eminence of traditional human connection.

Connection is similar to how coffee is linked to cookies. They both are different in form and use. Coffee is a brewed black liquid that is used to relieve mental and physical fatigue, while cookies are sweet baked treats that are consumed for extra energy. They are two strikingly different sets of ideas that are somehow integrated with one another because of one common goal, which is to indicate and fulfill snack-time.

As social beings, it is natural for us to crave connections. This can be proven by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. This theory dabbles around the stages of needs that all humans have in their lives. Love and Belonging, a stage that might be considered illogical due to the overly sentimental connotation that it brings, is in reality, a crucial need for humans. Truth be told, we always want to feel belonged and appreciated. Having more friends makes us elated, gracious and energized while constantly being alone makes us feel depressed and ostracized. Friendships fill up that void of loneliness in our hearts and motivate us to work. Even if we only have a small group of friends, as long as we feel the sense of belonging amongst people, we will still feel a part of this world.

I love making friends. There is always this strange energy within me to be socially insistent everywhere I go. I love gazing into other people’s eyes and drowning in the emotions and lessons that the interaction brings to me. I find myself continuously drenched in curiosity to what a conversation could lead to and how 5 minutes of chatting could generate a new experience of connecting with the world. Meeting new people is refreshing. I have friends who taught me to love science, appreciate heavy metal, cook up a delicious curry, use a switchblade knife and even properly milk a cow. This constant craving to learn more nourishes the curiosity in me and brought great impacts in my studies and social life.

Unfortunately, when it comes to connections in romantic relationships, it’s complicated. I can safely say that even the array of my past paramours has also added a twist to my value. I guess what I mean to say is the connections that I have with them and through them, I use to broaden my knowledge of things. One of my exes taught me Spanish, one taught me about how to sew and make leather goods, another taught me macroeconomics and another gave me beautiful insights on philosophy. They are my muses. They are the world. I am not attached to them. I love the inspirations, lessons, and warmth that they provided me with but when it comes to loving them as individuals, that’s another story.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in her memoir, “But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time—everything. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if you are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.” Sometimes it’s not even about love, it is about that exhilarating feeling of diving into something new and incandescent. But when that mysterious gossamer feeling erodes and the relationship transforms into something consequential and weighty, I run away and find myself trapped in the same situation again.

This resonates with how connections are held today. Jumping from one relationship to another seems very easy and supported while marveling at the state of being alone is either heavily scrutinized or encouraged in the most cliché way as possible (e.g “I’m single and I don’t need nobody”). It perplexes me why people do this because it is not a requirement for us to be in a relationship to feel loved and important. Charlotte Kahl, a psychotherapist who centers her writing on Sufism and Buddhism, wrote what Buddha saw of reality. She wrote, “there is only one reality—that form is emptiness and emptiness is form—that we are all made of the same substance, all interconnected”. This may explain why people are in open or casual relationships. They may enjoy the company of someone not entirely because of the intense feeling of affection that they bring to one another, but just enough warmth to get through the day.

I just love to love. I love talking for hours and just listening to other people. Sometimes it makes them uncomfortable because I make eye contact, use subtle touches and share stories quite openly. I think that you don’t have to love someone in a romantic way to obtain an intense connection. You just need to be genuinely interested in them, smile, remember their name, encourage them to talk about themselves, talk about their interests and make them feel important (Carnegie 1936). But the world lacks so much overtness that if you collectively decide to be present, you would either make people think that you are interested in them sexually or romantically, or that you are some sort of flirt that can never stay faithful and would use people for a Machiavellian mission. I am unsure.

Strange and bizarre experiences also arise because people would think that I adore them in a sexual way just because I was being polite. About several months ago, I stumbled across an interesting café in the Upper West Side and ended up conversing with the owner of the café and Bella, a woman who happens to be an app developer/entrepreneur who lives nearby. Long story short, the three of us shared contacts and LinkedIns. Lucky for me, they both offered me internships, which was unexpected. Sometime later, Bella and I talked again and engaged in a personal conversation. Somehow, she ended up sharing her pain of being broken up with by her partner and how lonely she felt. I listened and cheered her up a little bit. Eventually, she asked about my relationship status and tried to flirt with me, which made the conversation awkward. I politely declined her attempt to court me and erased my mission of getting an internship in her company.

I do not understand why a handful of people do not know the difference between a genuine intrigue and attraction. Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in now. The world lacks so much one-to-one attention that when we actually take the time to give it to the world, it would ask you “why?” and the correct answer would be “why not?”.

I remembered a conversation that I had with a guy that I had a “thing” with over a lazy Sunday brunch. He suddenly looked me in the eye and asked me to get up. I stopped mid-chew from my Eggs Benedict, got up and asked why. He held my hand and asked me to dance in the middle of this restaurant and said to me (while people were trying to get through), “Relationships are just like salsa. You can’t just dance and push your partner to one direction, or the other way around. You need that rhythm together and stay in the dance with your arms around each other. Or else it’s not salsa.” We ended things abruptly but he had impacted me a lot in my ideology of life. But I digress, he was right in spite of his unique way of conveying his point. Connections are also like relationships. You have to maintain them. You have to keep on dancing and find your rhythm. Finding a rhythm in any relationship/connection is difficult because it takes work and it takes patience to maintain it. It is different with networking online when you just add someone or someone adds you, then suddenly you are friends. A human connection is special. It’s an intense two-way street that involves a lot of revelation and truth, which I find quite hard to find in this world now.

Still, connections are not only used as a tool of affection, it is also a useful device to fulfill our needs and wants. Have you ever heard someone say, “Don’t worry about it, I’ve got connections?” This saying shows how people use others to achieve what they want in life. In business, connections/social engagements are treated as a golden compass to shiny, new opportunities. These opportunities could get you jobs, promotions, new investors, mentorship prospects and even financial help.

My management professor, a seasoned financier, and ex-director in a prominent bank in the United States, differentiates between strong ties (those you know very well), and weak ties (those to whom you are minimally connected – such as your college alumni). What really makes us connected in the business world is not who our strong ties – those provide us with trust and support, but rather our weak ties – these are where the majority of business opportunities and jobs come from. She later explained that if someone in a particular industry where you want to work knows you, and you know that person well enough that you know what s/he likes and dislikes, then you are more likely to obtain that position. What she said makes perfect sense. Businesses cannot grow without connections, and without business, there would be no products for us to enjoy. Thus, being able to “network” is now a key to obtaining a career.

Due to the internet and the effect of globalization, businesses are now hiring professionals who are able to approach and form bonds with the external world. (Vascellaro 2007). This phenomenon drove the existence of applications such as LinkedIn, for people to connect with other professionals that they might know, and boost the popularity of self-help books to win customers, manipulate people to get a job and use social media platforms to acquire more recognition.

My entrepreneurship club’s president once said, “I hate the word networking. It sounds so exclusive and arrogant. Why can’t we call it "making new friends" instead? Friends are nice to each other. They have our backs and remain faithful to one another." There is this impersonality and rigidity of the word “networking” that makes it sound like a job rather something that we naturally need to do as social beings. Socializing should be easy, profound and process-based. This idea, unfortunately, does not apply to how young people “make friends” in the job market.

More and more young people now are on fire, desperately looking for opportunities to obtain as many “connections” as they can. Connections in this context are made rapidly, with young professionals talking in a loud voice, acting that they are more knowledgeable than others, and looking over the shoulder of the person they’re talking to in case someone more interesting shows up (Shellenbarger 2014). Thus, the measure of success for young people today, it seems, is purely quantitative, instead of qualitative.

John M. Gottman, an emeritus psychology professor and relationship analyst said, “You don’t have to be interesting. You have to be interested.” A handful of young professionals, who are craving for high positions in the job market end up being overly fixated on what they can offer, that they repeatedly miss the opportunity to obtain the knowledge that their future company can give. If only they would sit, ask questions, make eye contact and carefully listen to what the person they are talking to is trying to convey, the possibilities of getting even more connections are endless.

I am quite shameless when it comes to making connections. If I think that you're cool, if I think that I would grow from being your friend and/or that you would add value to me as much as I would to you, why not be friends? There is a moment for everything and that moment can disappear before you know it. If you end up talking to someone that could potentially be your future employer or a good friend, give that person 10-15 minutes of your undivided attention, protrude your essence in that conversation and exchange numbers/social media. Keep talking to that person until you have a strong relationship that could lead to somewhere. If I hadn't randomly chatted with the lady who sat next to me in church, I wouldn't know that he is the Global Business Director of a leading Marketing company and I wouldn't have gotten the internship that I needed for next year. You never know who you sit next to, wherever you are. So observe and ask as much as possible because this world can be a strategic map of opportunities and growth, but only if you want it to be.

There are countless people nowadays who seem so popular and have this wondrous life on social media *Kylie Jenner, cough cough*, but feel ignored and uncounted in real life. An example of this is the story of Essena O’Neil. Essena is an 18 year old Australian girl who had over half a million of followers on Instagram, 60.000 on Snapchat and 200.000 on YouTube. All of the sudden, Essena deleted all of her social media platforms. She then explained her reasons, which are that she had a realization that her “perfect pictures” served nothing to the society other than obsessions over materialistic items and a need for social approval. She wrote on her YouTube channel’s caption, “I spent hours watching perfect girls online, wishing I was them. Then when I was ‘one of them’ I still wasn’t happy, content or at peace with myself,” (McCluskey 2015). The main cause of this phenomenon mainly is because all of us humans need that attentiveness. The physical and mental presence of others fill that hollowness in our hearts that causes so much problems in how we think of ourselves and other people.

Think about it. How awesome is a good hug after a bad day? Would a great hug ever compare with your Instagram followers? If I look back, I can actually count the number of friends from my Facebook friends list that would stand beside me through the infuriating things that I do. This made me ask myself why I even bother adding the rest of them in the first place.

Still, as educated and holistic individuals, it is important for us maintain human connections. It is not only to obtain money or b*tches, but to be human. To be social beings. To truly connect with people, feel a part of this world and give ourselves time to explore things that we wouldn’t be able to explore on our own.

Sources

• Shellenbarger, Sue. The Smartest Way to Network at a Party. Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, 14 Sept. 2014. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.
• Vascellaro, Jessica E. Social Networking Goes Professional. Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, 28 Aug 2007. Web, 10 Nov. 2015.
• Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Viking, 2006. Print.
• Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936. Print.
• McCluskey, Megan. Teen Instagram Speaks Out About The Ugly Truth Behind Social Media Fame. Time. Time. 2 Nov. 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.