Conflict

Conflict in the general sense of the word means disagreement or an argument over some topic. But conflict can be of so many types and forms. I think a good question you could ask yourself, to understand what conflict means to you, is to ask yourself in what positions in life do you feel conflicted, what things, opinions, values, perceptions or people do you feel conflicted with? Let us look at this objectively.

I feel conflicted with societal rules and standards that seem unreasonable or unrealistic. For example, there is this unwritten rule for human life, that you have to do school, get a job, get married and have kids. It is a very well-oiled machine that lets this society run, successfully managing to keep people never really looking for the truth. Truth can be a little extreme but it keeps people for never even questioning their mundane lifestyle. Of course, from an evolutionary point of view, we need this as a species. We need the education to understand this complex world we’ve built, we need to get jobs so that this giant machine keeps working, get married because we’re social animals and finally have kids because that’s all that truly matters to nature. I am conflicted that there are such few people try to question it? Try to understand what life means to them rather than becoming another brick in the wall? Plato said something I’ll never forget ~ you can easily forgive a child for being afraid of the dark but you cannot forgive a man for being afraid of the light. We live in a world where people who do try to look for something/ anything! Are called crazy.

In reality, I believe, we are all conflicted within ourselves. When you see an angry man screaming on the traffic that truly no one has a control on, you can see what he’s conflicted with. It’s not the car in front of him or the man that just cut him, it's with himself. He’s tired of his mundane job, his angry wife and his ungrateful children. He cannot control the traffic but he could control his job, make himself happy and try to make his wife happy as well! Understand that his life makes everyone around him miserable. Maybe get a job he adores, moves closer to the countryside, there’s so much to be done. But this takes a vision and bravery, which the society has made sure to be churned out of people. So its easier to remove this frustration on the traffic rather than changing his life.

I think that all types of conflicts people generally face in life is not with the things around them but within themselves. But humans are complex beings themselves and I’m not saying that there are simple ways to eliminate these conflicts. I think they’re rooted even deeper. Your complexes, superstitions, childhood traumas, inability to trust or fears are what creates conflicts within people around you and in you. Let us take a personal example - once I met a traveller who had a blog, she had an Instagram account for that blog and also had some stickers printed off the logo of her blog. I found this really funny, I asked her if there was someone who cared to actually read her blog because to me it seemed like an excessive thing to do. She seemed very calm when she responded. It didn’t matter, she said because it was for people close to me and myself. I really felt stupid at that point. I made a fool of myself. There’s really not much of a conflict you can see here on the surface at least, I’m sure she didn’t even pay it mind. This might look like a minor disagreement we had but the roots go deeper.

My general beliefs that people don’t care comes from a point of insecurity, that comes from many other issues. When I see a person, who’s very much like me, portray a kind of carefree attitude towards something where I feel rather insecure, I attack her. Though this is a very simple example, you can really see how deep-rooted things can be. It also proves that when people attack you, it’s usually because of their own insecurities. So I’d like to leave it at this, we’re all facing many conflicts in our life’s, understand that its very personal matter and is probably not caused by people around you. That’s usually the first step. When you understand that you are the reason for your own conflicts, you can solve these or try to anyways :)