Things tend towards chaos, following the principle of entropy. To try to conserve life or values in their original state is a wasted effort. If you put a piece of thread in your pocket, there are a billion chances that you retrieve it in an arrangement you didn’t desire and only one chance you find it in the proper arrangement. We have an idea of perfection; we think mathematically. But nature doesn’t abide by our made up science. We could as well have invented another science, called make-believe, and which should explain how nature should do everything we want and how reality should suit our perception. Mathematicians would argue that mathematical equations correspond to natural phenomenon, and therefore mathematics is simply the human decoding of nature. But this code is a pattern through which we sieve nature. The things that fall through the sieve are invisible to us and we’re simply left with things that correspond to the pattern. New encoding is always necessary whenever some anomaly is found, which means that mathematics is not a tool for exploration of reality but for replication. We try to emulate nature the way a kid doodles the horse he’s just seen gallop in front of him.
With the help of psychological reverse engineering, we could understand Valentin’s motifs. Although he and his direct witnesses lest us enough information, we deduced more information by analyzing Valentin’s acts and how they relate to his words. The first psychological fact that we reversed engineered is that Valentin skillfully played with Milena’s feelings. He didn’t deceive her, but he won her over fairly with psychological tricks. It sounds worse than it is, but what if I told you that your current idea of falling in love is based on psychological tricks? Valentin simply used the skills human had been honing for millennia before him: psychological terrorism. He didn’t let Milena think, not when they met, not when they dated. He didn’t do it deliberately, but rather subconsciously. He’d been conditioned to think that his own self was dangerous and therefore needed to be hidden. And he liked her form the moment he glimpsed at her at the riding hall. So he gave her a shock therapy of romance, not allowing her to form an objective opinion of him. Even when she broke up with him, he was still in her mind, through a process we call absentee lover.
With the obsolescence of ego, the interpersonal sphere changed completely. The correct meaning of love started to be uttered, while the hedonistic one fell into disuse. Love stopped being a catchphrase to hook someone and became a tacit agreement among any two people who frequented each other. Many courtship rituals fell into desuetude and some millennia-old romantic tragedies lost their currency, among them the concept of cheating. In your era, people have their heads so far up their asses that they based their relationships on a psychological phenomenon called attendance to life. This phenomenon comes from millennia of ingrained social habit of pairing up with someone to whom people had access. In ancient times, our tribes or our social background was essential to our mating rituals. Due to natural and human threats, societies were highly more constricted than in your era, where you can pair up with almost whoever you desire. However, some old-fashioned institutions, such as monogamy, still survive. Today, we partner up with only one person, generally, but monogamy is not a thing anymore. What’s wrong with that concept is that it doesn’t allow for nuances in our sexual lives. Attendance to life means, in a nutshell, that you don’t see life as a continuum but you artificially extirpate yourself from your past and future to, as you enjoy saying in your era, “live the moment.” Of course this is not ethically wrong, the same as there is nothing wrong in a firefly living the moment until it burns itself against a lamp. Today, however, we from stable relationships considering our partners’ past as well. Probably one of the most detrimental philosophies of your era was that of redemption, promulgated by Christians. It permeated even into the legal system, filling your heads with the idea that prisons were not mere tools of repression wielded by societies over their wayward members, but they were means to rehabilitate lost sheep to bring them back to the flock. Today, we don’t escape from our past so easily. Isolated acts are not taken into account, of course, but our algorithms keep us aware of our tendencies, or our habits, which form our character, as the wise Lao Tzu once said.
This information is used to discriminate ourselves. Remember that discrimination is not a bad word in our era. We know who we are and what we need to be happy. Thus, in our era, a sociopath has the chance to carry out a happy life without harm to others, because the algorithm of our characters is in plain sight, available to everyone who decides to get closer to us. And here is the key: Today we consciously and conscientiously decide with whom we engage in a relationship, be it friendship or sexual partnership. There are no more random gatherings of people, as there still are in your era, for instance neighbor gangs, classmates or colleagues. Society became so individualistic that we don’t hang out with people by location but by common interests. Of course, same as in your era, we tend to find compatible people at our educational and work places. Thus, some of us have friends from school or work. But this is just one of the possibilities we have to build meaningful relationships. In your era, you have a pernicious tendency towards clubbing, a concept you know as social networking. There are clubs for every one of your pastimes, and you have to put up with people whose companies you don’t enjoy in order to socialize. Today, we skip the socializing part. We rarely meet in groups of more than four in our era, since it’s proven to be the maximum amount of people you can meaningfully interact with at the same time. Also, these gatherings of more of two people are done only if we all know each other and never randomly, as in your era. It’s actually less complex and way more efficient than the way you do it. Let’s say you enjoy chess. You go play with some people, online or in a physical place. You meet many and, if you click with someone, you decide to become friends. Simple? The same with team sports, such as football. No one gets offended if you invite only one member of the whole group to your birthday. There still is comradeship among sportsmen, but no one is expecting an invitation for lunch from you after a match. These concepts may sound obvious to you, but, believe me, many people in your time succumb to social pressure all the time, inviting people they don’t like to intimate gatherings. This happens because your social paradigm of solidarity has not yet given way to individualism. Don’t get me wrong, we are solidary today, but we don’t need intimacy for that. Our solidarity comes rather from our deep respect for life in general and humanity in particular. Paradoxically, humanism leads to asocial behavior. But this is widely known phenomenon, even in your era. Your best writers and philosophers eschewed social life and, nevertheless, had a deep respect for every human being.
Nowadays we guide our lives, we don’t merely attend to them, as you do in your era. This means that we don’t fall in love with a neighbor just to realize later on that they are married to another person. Accidents like that never happen in our era, since psychologically healthy people avoid establishing relationships when they don’t get full reciprocation. A person who is already focused on a relationship will evidently be a poor match for a single person, so they are simply skipped until they became available again. Regarding the concept of cheating, which I mentioned before, in our era there is more leniency in relationships, which allow for sexual exploration. Sex is paramount to the longevity of a sexual relationship, as its name indicates, and we take care of its healthiness by all possible means. Some couples resort to sporadic customization via biotechnological gadgets, temporarily altering their appearance to bring novelty to their partners’ eyes. Every part of our bodies can be thus altered: eyes, hair color, body shape and even facial features. Thus, people never get bored of the physique of their partners anymore. When it comes to adventures, there is also a broad range of role playing scenarios which you can enter with your partner. This are vacations from your daily routine, where you test your skills in fictitious situations, staying in character for weeks if not months at a time. The main idea behind these couple retreats is to break away from the mechanisms of your relationship, so basically you stop being a couple for the time being and become new characters who must build a new interpersonal mechanism if they want to be together during the game. If a couple don’t see the sense in the fortification of their relationship, because they are simply not sure about each other, it is more than common to take sexual brakes, where both can explore their options, and eventually go back together. It’s worth clarifying that we are still human in our era; we get more involved with someone the more we know them and we can, in that way, get along with them more easily and love them better. We’ve simply managed to prevent the ancient drama of being separated from someone we deeply love, just because we can’t adapt to the sexual constraints society imposed on us. To give you an example of what I mean: In your era chastity is not a value anymore. Few among you keep yourselves chaste till you meet the partner with which you intend to spend the rest of your life. Most of you healthily explore your sexuality to then constrain it to one person in the name of love. In this way, you arbitrarily divide your interpersonal life into two stages: one of exploration, in which irresponsibility is socially allowed and one of commitment, where you impose restrictions on yourselves. Both stages are equally wrong, because most of people in your era abuse of the lack of accountability the first stage is marked with and simply disrespect other people’s time and emotions. People in your era are so ridiculous as to have a sexual relationship with someone without calling it a relationship. For most of you, a relationship only starts when you enunciate some magic words to each other, which is equivalent to thinking that a woman only gets pregnant when she acknowledges the fetus in her womb. Today, there are even laws against emotional mistreatment, and they are severely punished, though people aren’t self-centered as in your era, so these situations are always avoided and happen only in very odd turn of events. Your second stage is also wrong, though it’s almost the same as the mechanism of our current sexual relationships. The main difference is that we can start a serious relationship even with our first partner at an early age, because we can still sow our wild oats while developing a relationship with them. Many people in our era implement this roving eye system, in which they are with a stable partner form which they take occasional breaks to explore with other people. Since chastity is not a value in your era, what difference does it make whether a person has had sex before or after they met you? Sexual promiscuity does not have an expiration date in our era, so a person who has had several partners is considered promiscuous even though they are now in an exclusive relationship. Our tastes are not so much different today. There are still people who value chastity and would only pair up with a person who hasn’t had much sexual experience. The only difference is that those numbers are available to everyone who meets you, so you can’t just have a clean slate every time you meet someone new, as it’s common in your era. Sexual promiscuity is not looked down on today, but it puts off some people who are less promiscuous. The key to our society today is owning our character. Thus, people who are more sexual will mostly prefer people with their same sexual drive an avidity for exploration or, if on the other hand, they prefer chaste people, they could still find chaste people who prefer more promiscuous ones. Everything that concerns sexuality is a matter of taste and it is done openly, and thus romantic tragedies are avoided.
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