Nobody owes anything to anyone. Everyday myths: no one owes anyone anything! Is this so? Religious and political beliefs

11 months ago

BeautyHack columnist Dalia Genbor proves why you're commitment-free.

Many are outraged by this formulation, they say, we will slide into a society of self-centered, cynical and indifferent people, this is the path to degradation and destruction of the very essence of humanism. But I am sure that no one really owes anyone anything. Here are the simplest examples.

1. Shouldn’t you listen to your friend who is in trouble?

No, you shouldn't. I will definitely listen to her, I will try to support her morally and help, if it is in my power, I will be next to her, I will console and encourage her, make her laugh or cry with her. It's not a debt. This is friendship.

2. Shouldn't you support your husband when he's in trouble?

No, you shouldn't. I'll take the bulk everyday problems, I will help him find a specialist for the problem that has arisen, if necessary, I will support his family, I will discuss the problem with him and look for ways to get out, I will try to cheer him up and let him know that he is not alone with trouble. It's not a debt. This is caring.

3. Shouldn’t you create a comfortable environment for your child to develop and grow up?

No, you shouldn't. I will be attentive to children's desires and feelings, I will try to raise a person who is self-confident and has basic trust in the world. I will listen and hear, I will try to take into account the child’s individual abilities, I will make every effort to ensure that he is happy. It's not a debt. This is Love.

4. Shouldn't you help an elderly woman with a heavy bag?

No, you shouldn't. I will help her get on a bus or train, give up her seat on public transport, hold the door or carry her bag to the elevator. It's not a debt. This is kindness.

5. Shouldn't you build normal relationships with your colleagues?

No, you shouldn't. In my work duties assigned job description, does not include the presence of friendly relations with colleagues. I maintain an informal style of communication, go to birthdays and corporate parties with them, and share funny stories. It's not a debt. This is friendship.

6. Shouldn't you save a hungry stray kitten?

No, you shouldn't. I will try to find kind hands for the kitten, feed and cure it, or help pay for food and treatment, because it is small, defenseless and will disappear otherwise. It's not a debt. It's a pity.

7. Shouldn't you admire those who do the difficult and almost impossible?

No, you shouldn't. My subjective judgment about the need for these achievements and overcomings is a purely personal matter, and I can equally admire these people and consider their actions senseless and useless. But in any case, I will not judge them. It's not a debt. This is respect.

8. Shouldn't you help sick people?

No, you shouldn't. I really want everyone to be healthy and happy, but objective reasons It doesn't happen that way. I can and do transfer very small amounts to help in those cases when I consider it necessary and correct. It's not a debt. This is empathy.

9. Shouldn't you respect your parents?

No, you shouldn't. Respect cannot be imposed, it can only be earned. But I will take care of my parents and try to make their old age as comfortable as possible, because I understand how difficult it is for them now, and I realize that no matter how I evaluate their actions towards myself, they wished me well, and I am I do because that's how they raised me. It's not a debt. This is gratitude.

10. Shouldn't you hide your feelings if you were given a gift that you don't like?

No, you shouldn't. I will smile and thank you, even if I have mentally already sent the “gift” to the trash heap, because I would rather assume that the person was sincerely mistaken about my tastes and preferences, rather than intentionally trying to offend me. Most likely, he wanted to please me, but it didn’t work out. It's not a duty, it's a courtesy.

So if you owe someone something, you borrowed it yourself, and give it back yourself. Everything else is not about that. You should not. You just can.

Recently, on the Internet, I discovered an article that was addressed to the reader, inviting him to live with the following thought: “Nobody owes you anything,” “nobody owes anyone anything.” Moreover, these ideas were presented as everyday practice. And indeed, through the media, films, magazines, we hear similar ideas that supposedly help a person and make his life comfortable. If you have no expectations, then there will be no disappointments. Is this really so? Can this even happen in reality?

Below, in this article, I want to reflect on this topic, show a different, alternative view of these ideas. I start from a simple motive: I want people to learn to think for themselves, despite the colorfulness and attractiveness of those liberal ideas that flood our lives. And if what I say below pushes the reader to reflection and action, then the task of this article will be solved.

When I hear the words “no one owes anyone anything,” I get the feeling that this is being said by a person who has no social responsibility. In reality, man lives in society. And within the framework of social life, he has obligations to other people.

“No one owes anyone anything” and “one should not have expectations from other people” - this idea is inherently false and harmful, only for the simple reason that in this idea there is no dialogue, no interaction between people, no agreements, no relationships. This idea destroys collective identity. Since no one owes anyone anything, it turns out that a person can do without the other. The idea reflected in the title of the article can easily be called the motto of the society of egoists. But in reality, we are seeing something completely different. Without someone like himself, a person ceases to be a person, because only in dialogue with another does a person preserve himself, his humanity. Even Robinson needed Friday to remain human.

Living in society, it is impossible not to have expectations from other people, since our expectations are one of the foundations of dialogue and agreements. People's social lives are agreements. We always agree with someone about something. And it doesn’t matter whether these agreements are formal (elevated into laws, rules) or informal. Social norms and agreements are just manifestations human culture. Animals don't have social norms. They only have instincts. Reader who shares the idea in the title, Do you want to live by instinct alone?

People who say they have no expectations are deeply mistaken and deceiving themselves and others. There are many examples of this: when a person comes to a doctor, he expects that he will be helped, that the doctor will treat him. When we send our child to school, we expect the teacher to teach. From loved ones we expect, at a minimum, acceptance, dialogue, feelings. Even at the end of the month, we expect to receive our salary at work. And these are also expectations. A person who cannot give anything to society is useless to it. And society gets rid of him.

If you follow the idea that no one owes anyone anything, then there will be no agreements between people. According to this idea, people should react calmly or at least indifferently to violations of existing agreements and boundaries. Then where do people have grievances against each other? Resentment is a disguised demand. For as long as humanity has existed, this social emotion has always existed, which means that people have always had expectations from each other. If this idea were viable, people would have removed grievances from their lives long ago.

How do you like this situation? A young woman who has a child will say: “But I owe nothing to anyone and no one owes me anything. And therefore I will not sacrifice my time or career for the sake of the child.” Many of the women will say that this is unacceptable. Or imagine a situation where during the Second World War people would have said: “We don’t owe anyone anything, so put the bayonet in the ground.” The consequences of such statements are not difficult to imagine. Such a society is not viable.

Dialectics

Our life is full of contradictions, we ourselves are constantly faced with them. What can I say - man as an entity is himself contradictory. And not because there is something wrong with him, but because life works that way. Take any social phenomenon, process, entity and you will find that there are always contradictions in it. This has been proven mathematically. For the curious, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

We are both part masculine and part feminine. We are both strong and weak. We can say to ourselves that we have time and we don’t have it. And there are a lot of such examples. Contradiction at the level of language and meaning are opposite poles. Any problem in a person’s life is a clash of contradictions. People, when faced with contradictions in life, want to take one of the poles and discard it. For example: I want to be strong and do not admit my weakness. I always want to do the right thing - and I don’t admit mistakes. But since the dialectic of life is that there are both poles, it will not be possible to completely discard it. Contradictions can only be reconciled (from the word “reconciliation”) by finding a synthesis. If you want, a balance of one and the other pole.

The idea “no one owes anyone anything” is just one of the poles. The second, opposite pole is the idea “everyone owes something to someone” or very often people say to themselves “everyone owes me something.” When a person thinks that everyone owes him, we talk about the personal irresponsibility of such a person. And when no one owes anyone anything, this is social irresponsibility. It turns out that the people who invite us to live in this idea invite us to move from one extreme to the other. Living as a socially irresponsible individual. A good choice. What’s worse is that such proposals can often be heard from some fellow psychologists who convey this not only to themselves, but also to their clients, offering ideas about the egoistic existence of individuals. I specifically emphasize individuals, not personalities, since personality is formed only in dialogue. As the saying goes, “they don’t know what they are doing.”

Why is this idea attractive?

In part, I answered this question above. Some of my colleagues propose this idea and “stand by it” as a universal recommendation for those who have problems with personal responsibility, disguising it as “personal development”, “responsibility for one’s own life”, etc. But in addition to personal responsibility, there is also social responsibility. And indeed, when a client comes with the idea that “everyone owes me,” what is obvious is the lack of responsibility for what is happening in his life. It is located like a pendulum at one of the poles. And the psychologist offers him the other pole. Essentially the same, but on the other side. This is a dialectical feature. And what then is “personal development” here? Change from sewing to soap. Perhaps, for a person who is totally irresponsible in relation to his own life and has never been to the opposite pole, the transition to the other pole, perhaps with a stretch, can be called “ personal development" I doubt.

On the other hand, for ordinary people this idea is also attractive because it can act as a very powerful shield so as not to enter into a certain experience, so as not to bind oneself to debt or obligations when it is not particularly beneficial. In general, the same picture of irresponsible behavior.

Take and give. Interchange.

Living in society, a person is in dialogue and in expectations regarding other people. And in their public relations, we are very often in the process of mutual exchange. Dialogue without this is impossible. In this regard, I remembered the works of the famous German psychologist and philosopher B. Hellinger, who described the process of mutual exchange “take and give.” Let's think about this from the perspective of reciprocity and B. Hellinger's ideas.

When I am presented with the idea that “no one owes me anything,” there is common sense in it that encourages me not to build unnecessary expectations and demands on other people and to take responsibility for my life. Great idea. I completely share it. But, as I already said, there is another pole. Hellinger writes that when we give something to another person, we must give him the opportunity to give something in return. Having taken something from another, we become indebted to him (we go to the “take” pole), and to restore balance we need to go to the “give” pole so that feelings of guilt do not arise. People who tell us “you don’t owe me anything” disrupt this process, do not allow a person to “give back”, to restore this balance. Hellenger writes that those who only give and do not take (forbid themselves to take), in a sense, rise above people, giving rise to a feeling of guilt in those who gave. It is not difficult to guess that in the lines described above, this is nothing more than an imbalance and a departure to one pole, then to the other. But life is dialectical!

Conclusion

“And what is proposed?” - the reader will say. The author talked a lot, but offered nothing? The way out of the contradictions discussed is in their synthesis. The idea is that we should and shouldn’t at the same time, that someone owes us something and doesn’t owe us something at the same time. We should and we shouldn't. Simultaneously, in the unity of this “should” and “should not”. The question is in context, place, time, situation, Measure - as the unity of the categories of quantity and quality in its integrity. A person cannot separate himself from society, either physically, psychologically, or culturally, otherwise he will cease to be a person. Even a reclusive monk is in dialogue with God! Without people, but in dialogue, accordingly, psychologically he is already in society. How can culture, as an essence, be taken away from a person? Only if you turn him into an animal (similar successful experiments were carried out by the Nazis), but even in this case, a piece of social, and, therefore, cultural interaction between people remained.

And how can these contradictions be reconciled? The key to this lies in the cultural experience of man and humanity, in fairy tales, fiction, stories, myths, proverbs. This is a source, a whole storehouse of “solutions” for the synthesis of seemingly irreconcilable things.

I want the reader to think, to think independently, holistically, to be able to separate or “reflect” on the ideas that fill our modern life. And since not all ideas are equally useful, I was able to figure out what is “good” and what is “bad.” This is my expectation from the reader. As the philosopher Merab Mamardashvili said, “The devil plays with us if we do not think accurately.” But I want us to be played to a greater extent not by the Devil, but by God. And you?

Marina Saraswati:

"NO ONE OWES NOTHING TO NOBODY!" - a phrase around which a lot of controversy arises.

• How is it that I don’t owe anything? - people ask - what happens then, complete lawlessness and permissiveness?
• I do not owe anything to anyone! - the man declares and leaves his family with small children and goes to his mistress.
• No one owes nothing to nobody! - the poor old woman sighs doomedly, once again not waiting for a carton of milk from her grandchildren.

Yes, the phrase “no one owes anyone anything” is scary. Essentially, it is about separation and scares those who have not gone through this process.

She is frightening because:

• people can take advantage of this freedom and stop taking others into account;
• loss of control and manipulation levers through feelings of duty and conscience;
• but, most of all, it frightens us with the feeling of loneliness that will invariably follow - after all, if we don’t owe anything to anyone, should we? What happens is it’s every man for himself and I can’t count on anyone in this world?

All these are the fears of those who did not go through the natural process of separation during adolescence. When every child goes through a rebellion against the laws and rules that limit his freedom. When a child ceases to be a child and establishes new forms of relationships with adults, based on equals, on partnerships. But the adults, due to their fears, did not give him this opportunity. In essence, they drove it into the flask of their installations, stopped its development, and froze it. So the child remained a child. This is how most people live. And it doesn’t matter how old they are - children with gray hair.

And one day this process catches up with us later. And it doesn’t matter to him how old we are, whether we have a family, work and obligations. Suddenly, a person remembers that he forgot and lost himself in this life. All he does is serve his work, his family, his children. And he, with his desires, interests, talents, is not in this life. And life passes and time drips...

I have seen many people who suddenly leave their families, jobs, and businesses. They go “into the forest” - into solitude, into free swimming and “enjoy freedom” (essentially, childhood). They allow themselves to do nothing, or it would be more correct to say, “Do only what they want.”

You will definitely meet such people among alcoholics and “dukhariks” - those who are carried away by self-knowledge. They will tell you beautiful lies that “we were born to be free.” Sometimes these noodles neatly fall on the grateful ears of naive girls, who, enchanted by this chatter, open their arms and spread their legs, the spirit of freedom is so tempting! - exactly until they discover that their charms did not work either, because each of them is sure that he is like this simply because he has not met her.

Miracles do not happen, the boy has not yet matured enough to be responsible to others for his actions and actions - this also happens. The boy is so far simply enjoying the process of permissiveness and has not reached the frightening stage - that “no one owes him anything.” True freedom begins after recognizing one’s total loneliness, and not everyone reaches it. True freedom begins after the phrase “No one owes me anything,” no one and nothing! It sounds doomed, because here our childhood fear of being left completely alone and mom and dad won’t be around comes into play. Can I handle it? Will I be able to live relying only on myself? (Fry potatoes, sleep alone in the apartment at night). This list goes on: raising your children alone, being left alone in your old age...

But, if we are completely honest with ourselves - if we do not chicken out in this process and do not hide our heads in the sand, we will discover something incredibly beautiful - we will meet the dawn! And this will be the dawn of our maturity! And this dawn, with its first rays of the sun, will illuminate the space that frightened us with its darkness and we will discover that Yes! We cope! And we are not alone, there are adults around us with whom we can interact from a position of partnership and equality.

Adults know how to negotiate, negotiate terms and sign contracts. And yes, sometimes it happens that someone breaks the terms of the contract and then he either takes responsibility and compensates for the partner's losses, or the partners will no longer do business with him.

And adults do what they want! And it may turn out that everything you did out of a sense of duty, you want to do, but out of a state of inspiration!

Now read this phrase “No one owes anyone anything.” Read it out loud and with different intonations. This phrase sounds like a mantra! It gives us the freedom and right to build mature relationships based on “I want, I can, I do.” I shouldn't, but I want to! And this has a different quality, a different energy, a different taste!

Bring grandma a carton of milk and a bun, anticipating how happy she will be and how pleased I am to do this now.

Live with a woman and her children because you love them and you like to take care of them and no matter what happens - these are your loved ones and you do not want to leave them alone.

Sometimes I look at the world and see that there are very few truly grown-up people. But this is the process of growing up... it slowly embraces many, infects with its taste and maturity, and sometimes the time just comes and unlearned lessons from the past knock on our door and remind us of themselves - “it’s time to grow up”, it’s time to throw off masks and obligations.

Just listen to how beautiful it sounds: I don’t owe anyone anything!

The debt is paid! Begins new stage- stage of open relationships!

I invite you to dialogue, what do you think about this?

Write comments, share with others, I will be grateful for feedback and reposts.

Christmas is coming, and I have a problem again: I don’t know what to give you. I know that you are interested in many things - books, games, dresses.

I want to give you something that will stay with you for a long time - much longer than usual. Something that will remind me of me every Christmas.

And I think I know what I can give you. One simple truth, which did not open up to me right away. And, if you understand it now, it will improve your life many times over. And you won't have to deal with problems that affect people who have never heard of this truth.

It's simple: Nobody owes you anything.

What does it mean?

How can such a simple statement be important? You may not think so yet, but this statement will literally save your life. No one lives for you, my child. Because you are you, and no one else. Everyone lives for themselves, for the sake of their own happiness. And the sooner you understand this, the sooner you will get rid of the expectation that someone can make you happy.

This means that no one is obliged to love you. And if someone loves you, it's because there is something special about you that makes them happy. Try to understand what this feature is and strengthen it so that you will be loved even more. And if people do something for you, it’s because they want it. This means that for some reason you are dear to them and they want to please you. But not because someone owes you something just like that.

This means that no one should respect you. And some people won't be kind to you. But once you understand that people don't have to be kind to you, you will learn to avoid communicating with those who might hurt you. And you, in turn, don’t owe them anything.

And again: Nobody owes you anything.

You should only become better for yourself. And in this case, others will be drawn to you, will want to support you and share what they need with you. And someone won't want to be with you, and it won't be about you. And if this happens, just look for the relationship that you want. Don't let someone else's problem become yours.

When you understand that the respect and love of others must be earned, you will never expect the impossible and will not be disappointed. Others should not share their feelings or thoughts with you. And if they do, then you deserve it. And you have reason to be proud of the love you receive, and the respect of your friends, and everything you have earned. But don't take it for granted because this way you can easily lose everything. They are not yours by right, all this must be earned.

My experience.

It was as if a stone had been lifted from my shoulders when I realized that no one owed me anything. As long as I thought this wasn't true, I spent too much effort when I didn't get what I wanted.

No one should just respect me, be friends with me, love me, develop me. My relationships ended up benefiting from this - I learned to be with the people I want to be with and do only the things I want to do.

And this understanding gave me friendship, business partners, loved ones, potential clients. It always reminds me that I can only get what I want if I can reach the other person. I have to understand what he feels, what is important to him, what he wants. And only then will I understand whether I want to get involved with this person.

It's not easy to explain in a nutshell what I had to learn over the years. But maybe you will re-read this note every Christmas and its meaning will become clearer.

I hope so, because this is something you should understand as early as possible: no one owes you anything.