If We Meet In Hell, It Isn't Hell
Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Lately, I’ve noticed a steep rise in cynicism around relationships. Some of it no doubt comes from the collapse of old, often exploitative models. But alongside that collapse has come a very transactional view of human connection, where we keep score of what we give and others fail to return.
Even the way we understand emotion has become transactional: my anger proves your wrongdoing; my sadness proves your failure. Feelings become receipts for what we think we’re owed. The goal is no longer connection. It’s establishing indebtedness.
What’s lost in all this is the value of relationship.
The Buddha was once asked whether right relationships were not half of a well-lived life. He replied that they were not half: they're the whole of a well-lived life.
Because the right relationships change everything. They show you new possibilities for joy, the truth you’ve been avoiding, how to love yourself, and what it means to find a home in the world. Neither your phone nor winning an argument can do that.
The Buddha also said we need to see the goodness in others as desperately as a person dying of thirst needs water. That means two things: we need each other far more than we think, and gratitude is a full-time job. Seeing the good isn’t always easy. But that’s an argument for strengthening our gratitude daily, not for giving up.
People say the world is falling apart. But I wonder how much of our despair comes from measuring our lives by the condition of the world rather than how we meet one another within it. We’re not owed a world that holds together. But even in a broken one, we can still see, love, and shelter one another.
As the poet Geoffrey Hill wrote, “If we meet each other in Hell it’s not hell.”
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