“I wanted you to fight for me.” That was the sentence the son told his dad, Charlie.
Life has got like trade-offs these days. No intention to judge anyone, because there is no difference; everybody does that these days, which shows how screwed-up we are.
1: Relational or Transactional?
Recently, I encountered the word “Relational,” which I found the opposite of; this word is “Transactional.”
Dr. Karen Horton, on her website, describes the difference between them as follows:
1 – Relational connections are rooted, rewarding, and reciprocal. There is a natural give and take. They feel safe. A relational relationship is more about how it gets done. It’s about winning the hearts and minds of people. Relational engagement methods operate with a long-term view, aimed at building relationships and acknowledging the need for a stable foundation for future engagement.
2 – Transactional connections are more self-serving. Typically, transactional approaches are short-term engagement methods aimed at getting something with minimal fuss. Transactional relationships are often temporary, can be taxing on the mind and body, and are all about the short-term. Get what you want, and win the sale without much thought to the customer’s needs or the longer-term.
2: Lifestory
What we do in our lives, no matter what, is important because it shapes scenes of a story that someone writes about themselves and the world around them. Once you darken somebody’s view of life, it is irreversible. What we do has a lasting impact, no matter whether we can see it through or not. Life is like what you write on a paper, but with one big difference: once it is written on a paper, it isn’t erasable anymore, and it’s part of someone’s lifestory.
If you look into your life as a story that you are writing every moment and you’re free to write it however you want it, you try to be the best writer you can. You’re not only a writer, but also a character from some other people’s story. You need to be careful about your steps. Life isn’t just about you. Once you understand that you, yourself, and your needs aren’t the only purpose of your living, you try to look at the bigger picture of life—a view that looks into every person’s eyes with respect, and not judging people based on their past or other societal factors.
3: A repeating Pattern
I have seen a repeating pattern in movies. Something happens to the people who decide to have a child—or they don’t, but they get tangled in a relationship because of their partner’s pregnancy.
The funny story is that evolution somehow has made it impossible for men to understand the periods of women’s ovulation. In other mammals, the males can recognize which female is ready for fertilization, but humans do not.
Having a child has this potential to change somebody’s life completely in a good way.
This is somehow what you see in this movie too. Max changes Charlie’s life incrementally. Charlie, who is trying to forget, starts to be awakened by Max’s actions.
This is the moment that this sentence comes to my mind:
Modernity wants to change everything, but the question is, ‘For good or bad?’ There should be a reason behind our ancestors’ behaviors and why they repeated for thousands of years. We need to understand the purpose of a long traditional norm and then try to erase it. Postmodernism can be toxic if we don’t understand the reason behind the old norms and the reason behind the recent patterns of shaping young minds.
For sure, the whole picture is bigger than that and lots of factors are involved, but this movie is a good starting point to begin asking ourselves questions.
If you’re interested to hear more about marriage and having a child, recently he has interviewed Jordan Peterson and they talk about it more: Joe Rogan Experience #2308 – Jordan Peterson.
4: Belief
Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), placed a central emphasis on beliefs as the key drivers of human emotion and behavior. His core idea is that irrational beliefs are the primary source of psychological distress.
Epictetus has put it in a very beautiful way:
“People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.”
At first, Charlie believes that he has lost a lot. He is blind to see how Bailey and Max love him and how it is simple to care about someone and think about the effects that your behaviors have on their lives.
He refuses to believe until he loses both of his loved ones. His heart starts craving a new mindset. When he starts to see the world again, he sees everything differently. He isn’t the same person. The last scene of the movie is a witness to this claim.
5: Things to remember
You need to believe in the good that exists in people. People have reasons for their behaviors. You don’t need to tell people their mistakes; just be silent as a mirror, and they will understand something is off with them.
Don’t let life beat you up to a level that you are close to ending up in nowhere. Fight back even if you don’t see any reason for it. No reason is a good reason to start to be different. Don’t look for big stuff—spoon by spoon, change. If you endure, you will measure up to that.
And one last thing: if you care for someone, do it dearly, because no transactional relation can compete with a relational one.
