Nov 9, 2024
there used to be stronger guiding ideals / expectations for what relations between people should be like. now things are more formless. you can be fucking and that can mean anything, you can be friends with benefits or a situationship or just dating or long term committed, and then even when you have one of these labels there’s a vagueness around what is implied in terms of expectations duties responsibilities. or you can be “not putting a label on it” - explicit formlessness.
obviously this is good in some ways. freedom to do things how you want! choices in what love means for you! i concede that. but this formlessness is also terrible, absolutely terrible.
the problem is that in the case for the goodness of formlessness there is an implicit assumption which sounds something like: deep down in you there are your true preferences, the things you really want, which will come out of you give them the space to. i think this is mostly not true. i don’t think preferences exist so neatly separate from beliefs / expectations.
some context is required. i’m skeptical of this separation because i’m big on a theory called predictive coding, which posits that what the brain is doing is just minimizing prediction error: being as unsurprised by sensory data as possible. there are two ways to do this. you can update your beliefs to predict sensory data better. or you can act in the world to make what you perceive better match what you expect. beliefs + the prediction error minimization drive is what causes action!
on this view preferences are expectations about how the world is, and the prediction error minimization drive is what causes you to act on your preferences. so it’s not that you have preferences moulded by societal expectations, it’s that the preferences and expectations are made of the same kind of stuff, such that you can’t separate one from the other. so what happens once society no longer hands you down strong expectations about how to behave in different relationships?
well, relationships still happens because there are some expectations and also strong bodily hyperpriors for company / sex / intimacy (i.e. you have, at some level, hard-coded expectations about these things that are hard to override).
but also, relationships are harder in the most fundamental way possible. they are harder to make sense of, more unpredictable, and so more aversive. i need to write a proper detailed introduction to predictive coding somewhere, because i feel i’m not giving enough context here but in predictive coding it’s quite natural to think of your ‘self-image’, your model of what kind of person you are, which in a self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of way drives your behavior. and one way i understand this increased fundamental difficulty of modern relationships is that they destabilize this sense of self, they make it harder to have a simple coherent understanding of what sort of person you are.
but also, this formlessness makes weird arrangements possible. sally rooney characters commonly end up in some kind of situation where they really care for the relationship, but where there are no preexisting expectations to guide them. but they still try, and try to figure out the roles and expectations for themselves. very respectable that they attempt it - the default zoomer response is inaction, not trying. these are arrangements which wouldn’t be possible without this societal formlessness, they’re a microcosm of the beautiful upside of this terrifying freedom. peter at the end of intermezzo is the example i’m thinking of here.