Who You Let In your life?

The first things always matter the most to me, I don't know why, but I feel like the impact of first things, first people — anything that's "first" — is somehow more special, more special than what comes after. And for this website, and for this part of the blog — maybe "blog" isn't even the right word for it, whatever it is — I kept thinking about what could be the most important thing, for me. And every time I think about that question, the way I always do, nothing comes to mind except people. Human beings. For the most important thing in this world — to me, people have always been it. The most important beings on this planet, to other people. Not for any other reason. I mean, to me, people are the most important thing in my life, at least. And these people can be anyone — people I dislike, people I love, people I don't know at all. Any race, any background, any country, any language — none of that matters. The most important thing, to me, is the existence of a human being in this world. That means something specific to me, in my own personal life. People often ask me why I'm so calm, so relaxed, why I don't seem to care when something happens, or why I don't get upset when something expensive breaks, or gets lost, or gets stolen — why I don't stress over it. And everyone assumes I'm just a careless kind of person. But that's not really how to look at it. It comes back to the same thing I've been saying from the start: the most important thing to me has always been people. I worry about people — about their lives, their health, their pain, their laughter, their happiness. Anything other than people might upset me a little, sure. Any change in things, in objects — that can be upsetting too. But it fades fast. Something of mine breaking, or a situation being taken from me, or something happening to my belongings — that might upset me for a moment. But because it matters so little to me compared to people, I genuinely can't let it affect my mood or my thinking, even if I wanted to. So to me, people matter because — I think — every person's life comes down to the people around them. The people they connect with. People who came for a while and left. People who stayed until the end. People who could have come. People who were there from the beginning, like family. People you spend a huge part of your life with, like friends. People you're meant to share the most private parts of your life with, like a partner. And people you're meant to give your whole life to, like a child. And the more I think about it, moving forward — okay, these are the things that make up a life. Not the phone I have, not the car I have, not the house I have, not how much money I have. And this isn't me trying to sound inspirational or preachy. This isn't about trying to sound like an Instagram reel. But the most important thing, at least in my mind, is that a person's whole life revolves around the people around them. That said, there's a warning I always carry in my mind. Because people matter so much to me, and because I believe so strongly that we're deeply shaped by the people around us — by who we let into our lives, and whose lives we let ourselves into — there's a real danger here. If we get it wrong, and we will, because we're human and mistakes are inevitable, we can end up taking our whole life somewhere that isn't good at all. And that's just from choosing the wrong person once. Now imagine someone who makes that mistake more than once — not just letting one wrong person in, but several. How much potential can that cost someone? How much can it waste? And I think that's exactly what it comes down to — the people around you.

Which brings me to the next part: closeness. How close you let people get. If you let someone into your life who hasn't earned that closeness, who doesn't deserve the space you're giving them — and you become someone in their life who they haven't earned either — that same warning goes off again. Why? Because, in my experience — I haven't researched this scientifically, this is just what I've seen — people tend to think they're always the smart one, the important one, the capable one. And if someone genuinely doesn't deserve you — and I don't just mean a partner, I mean a friend, an acquaintance, a coworker, anyone — if the gap between what you deserve and what they deserve gets too wide, that warning comes back. Because if you're above someone, and that person naturally sees themselves as important (like I said), they'll try to pull you down instead of pulling themselves up. Now, if someone genuinely tries to rise to meet you instead — I wouldn't put that person in the same category as someone less worthy or less deserving than you. Someone who's always trying, who chooses to lift themselves instead of feeling jealous or dragging others down — that person deserves more than most. But someone whose worth is lower than yours, in whatever sense you mean it, and who — instead of trying to reach your level — tries to pull you down to theirs so you end up equal — that person doesn't deserve much. Either way, people in a relationship eventually end up at the same level. Either they're both trying to rise and meet in the middle, or one is pulling the other down until they're equal. That's why it matters so much who we let into our lives, who we get too close to too fast, who we hold onto longer than we should. And the last thing that matters a lot — bringing the wrong person into your life, and then letting go of them. Sometimes we let the wrong person in, and at some point we realize it. I'm not just talking about a romantic relationship here — this person could be a coworker, a friend, your partner's partner (emotionally), or anyone you're connected to. Letting someone in, and then failing to let them go — that might be the biggest blow a person can deal to themselves. And I think this is something almost universal — we all know we've let the wrong people into our lives at some point, and we can't seem to let them go, for whatever reason. Maybe attachment. Maybe because out of a hundred bad things about them, there are two good ones, and we cling to those two and can't walk away. For me personally, the reason we struggle to let go usually comes from something inside ourselves — some issue, some wound, some ego, some shadow we're carrying. And maybe that person, without meaning to, has touched exactly that shadow — the thing we can't quite detach from — and that's why we keep holding on and can't let them go. Where's the actual problem? I always think of it like this: imagine you paid for a movie ticket and sat down for a two-hour film. Thirty minutes in, you realize the movie is terrible, and you've wasted that thirty minutes. There's still an hour and a half left. Now you have two choices — either write off the money you already spent and just leave and use your rest of the time for something more useful, or just say that I have paid for this movie so I have to sit and watch the whole movie and waste your whole two hours. ...it applies just as much to letting new people into our lives. And if the fear of "what we've already invested" stops us from walking away from a bad situation — from letting go of a person who might be good, might be bad, but for whatever reason isn't right for you, isn't right for your peace of mind — even if we don't mean to, we end up hurting ourselves by not letting go. And I think there are a lot of small, unrelated differences like this in life, differences and details that can quietly take our potential and turn our life into something worse than what it could have been.

So if I try to sum up everything I've been overthinking here — it comes down to this: the existence of other people, for people, matters this much because a person's life is genuinely shaped by the people around them. Coworkers, a partner, friends, family, children — this is what shapes a person's life, in my view. And that's why, in my own mind, I place such enormous importance on human beings — not on things. This is just my view. I'm not saying that if something else matters more to someone else, they're shallow or wrong. People are different, priorities are different. But for me, what determines a person's life — or at least determines mine — is the effect other people have on my own mind and soul. And that's why I put almost all of my effort into focusing on people, and on my relationships with them, more than on anything else. That’s it.