it's a weird feeling.
i'm going away for a week. not really in the good sense; five days straight with five hours or more spent traveling on planes and buses isn't exactly a utopia. but before i go, i want to talk about something that i figured out recently, something that has been bugging me for some time.
namely, there is this meme in society that "you only get something when you're not looking for it." this is applied to love, mostly, i suppose, but it can also be applied to other things, like vocation.
i've been trying to figure out why this is, because i think it's true, for some time now. one reason why it propagates might be because people are lazy; they don't want to look for something, and so this mantra provides a convenient excuse to sit back and watch TV, or something.
but there's something else going on, which occurred to me about a week ago. it is simply this: when you're looking for something in particular, you are more willing to believe that some subpar exemplar fulfills your criteria. in the language of relationships: if my stated goal is to find true love, then i will try my best to achieve that goal by trying my best to believe that any individual person is perfect for me. this results in disappointment, to be sure, but it also results in spending a lot of time on things that i wouldn't give a second thought if i weren't actively looking.
so what happens is that i -- we -- end up settling without realizing it. there's a sort of serial process, where we encounter people and eventually pick one and become romantically entangled with someone until the situation resolves itself. and if we're looking for such a situation, we will be more prone to picking a person who might not be right, thus never getting to the potential perfect who we get to if we're not looking.
so it's a combination of settling for subpar alternatives and deluding oneself into thinking that something is what you're looking for that leads to this lack of success in the case where one is looking. it's not really that you're more likely to find it; it's that you're more likely to find something else you think is it. same deal with other areas; you go in with preconceptions, and sure enough, you find what you think is what you're looking for. but ultimately it falls apart because it can't lead up to your expectations; it's like a doorknob that isn't quite the right fitting. in the sense that it's useful for a while, but ultimately it's going to give out.
this is, i think, why we seem to find the perfect X's during a time in our life when we're not looking for X. obviously there are exceptions -- you don't need to tell me that -- but, by and large, i think this is a good example of the perils of narrow-mindedness.