Cold-Starting Human Relations: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Visibility of Value

A friend of mine has recently achieved some very real success. What unsettles her, however, is the self-consuming question: “Why would people be so good to you for no reason?” She said she has never been able to make sense of it.

At the macro level, one reason is that Chinese people, in general, lack a sense of deservingness; another is that many excellent people are more or less prone to impostor syndrome. My own view is quite simple: whether others treat you well is, first of all, a matter of their judgment and mood. There is no need to perform a psychological audit on their behalf. And if you do in fact have value, then being treated well by others should instead be regarded as normal.

I personally think social life broadly has two forms: one is intimacy, and the other is exchange. Intimacy almost entirely depends on contingency; exchange is the ordinary condition. The core of value exchange does not lie in how many material benefits one brings to others, but in whether one allows others to feel that they have gained something: intellectually, emotionally, and so on. To put it in more utilitarian terms, one has to give others a reason to choose cooperation.

Many people are afraid of owing emotional debts, so they become constrained in both directions: after giving something to others, they also dare not take anything from them. This is a very common mistake. A good interpersonal relationship should be dynamically balanced. If it simply collapses toward either side, it is unhealthy in a symmetrical sense; one-sided giving in exchange for “liking” is not exchange. Even in traditional Chinese rural society, human ties were built on mutual indebtedness that could not be simply “settled.” In general, since I have chosen to give, I should also have the corresponding composure to receive.

In most cases, one can choose to give first, because doing so releases a signal of cooperation. Relationships are always a matter of moving toward one another: I need to give others the opportunity to go further, and others also need to be willing to go further with me. Petty gains are fundamentally irrelevant. If one can thereby gain a partner for deep cooperation, the return is immeasurable.

“When virtue is complete, things arrive afterward.” Of course, good wine still fears a deep alley, but that is mostly a matter of creating the occasion for dialogue. The more important question remains: what kind of value can I provide? A rare commodity naturally draws attention; when something is genuinely scarce, those little calculations are hardly worth mentioning. Nor should one fall into the mistake of relying on one’s own ability, as if competence alone made everything possible. If something cannot give others a sense of gain, then even if one possesses it, it is not value, because it cannot be exchanged.

The urge to lecture others is an absolute defect. I can share my feelings and views, but I must never use them to overwrite another person’s structure of experience; that is a profound disrespect toward others. So if people do not ask, do not speak. What others do is, in itself, irrelevant. If they are people I care about, then doing my best is enough.

After that, the remaining questions become purely technical problems: solve them by formula, and there is no great difficulty. In essence, it only depends on whether one has met the right people. I am, in fact, someone with very poor emotional intelligence. I do not have delicate emotional experiences, nor do I possess that kind of natural capacity for care. So in this area, there is truly not much that I understand.

So social life is actually very boring: not because of boring petty calculations, but because it is sufficiently algorithmic, and in the end consists of techniques and operations. What is genuinely worth it is the important people: spending time accompanying them, spending time sensing what is there, understanding those stories that exceed embodied circumstance, and digesting the desire to share that flows out naturally. I personally think that the completion of career and intellect alone is not so worthy of desire. Perhaps richer experience is what is truly worth pursuing within a finite life. Money, knowledge, and people’s stories and feelings are all only parts of that.