Answer to the question ‘How to make things that are important to myself meaningful to us someone else?’

Well, before we actually answer the question, one should always wonder why we asked a given question. And especially in this case we can have the impression that too much is expected from this someone else, that there’s something suspicious about this need for someone else to find what we’re doing meaningful. So I would warn to be a little bit cautious about this need that what is important to us will be meaningful to others. Because they can easily be a form of dependency of quest for being reassured, for security. So in a way, there’s nothing wrong about wanting other people, especially people who are important to us to find what we’re doing meaningful. But it should not be needy because that’s the first that would be an obstacle that could make the other one react negatively to what is important to us. And as well, we have to be conscious of what those important things imply for the other person. There could be a competition if someone is close to us between what is important to us and the importance of this person. Now, this might be difficult to avoid especially for example in a couple relation, but we just have to be conscious of this difficulty and not be blindly asking this question and not be expecting the other person to be immediately overjoyed with the fact something is important to us. Jealousy is not necessarily toward another person that it can be towards another activity.

Now this being said here that there would be two meanings to be meaningful. One of them, is that what you’re interested about or someone is interested about is immediately meaningful to the other person. For example, you would share the same interest what is meaningful to you with in itself will be meaningful to the other person. So that is possible indeed and in a way that’s good and interesting when we’re interested in something and the other person that is close to us as well is interested in this what is meaningful to us. And then of course we can share the interest, we can share the activity and things are rather easy then. But of course if the person is asking that it means that it’s not obvious, it’s not given that what the he or she is doing is meaningful to the other person and otherwise, there would be a non-issue and there will be no question. Then there is another way of thinking meaningful is the acceptance that something is meaningful to the other person without it itself being meaningful for us and I take a simple example. Somebody is a chemist, woman is a chemist very interested in chemistry, research or teaching whatever, and the other person whom she wants to get interested in is not particularly interested in chemistry. So he is not motivated toward the science so it would be a bit difficult, but suddenly you want somebody who’s not interested in chemistry to be interested in chemistry because it’s a bit of a particular activity: it doesn’t speak to everyone it implies to have some kind of knowledge. So you can tell this person about this with that aspect of you working in chemistry, in itself cognitively it might be totally meaningless. Not only because of a lack of interest, but simply because it has no cognitive meaning: molecules or reactions or chemical processes might mean nothing to the other person cognitively. So then meaningful here mean something else. It means that the other person should understand that something is meaningful to the other person and then what is meaningful is not so much the object of interest, but the relation to the object of interest that one could understand and accept the fact that chemistry is something meaningful to the other person. That means to accept the fact that someone is very interested in chemistry: spends a lot of time studying chemistry, brings books about chemistry and even knows the other person doesn’t really know chemistry to accept and understand this interest in chemistry. Normally that we would view as something positive because the fact that someone has a passion is important. So the idea here maybe there’s a little pedagogical work to do with explaining that passion is not explaining chemistry, which would make you sort of a teacher, but to explain the relationship to chemistry. What does it imply? What is the interest there?

Add to try to make the other person understand how is chemistry meaningful to you. So here we have two different things: one is the meaning of chemistry itself, its content is significant and the other thing is how we relate to chemistry and why it’s important. And therefore you share the meaning of chemistry throughout discussing the actual meaning of chemistry. So here it has to be a little bit pedagogical and a little bit sensitive to the fact that this chemistry might be meaningless to know the person and to compensate by explaining why chemistry is important to you which doesn’t exclude dealing with some aspects of chemistry that can be interesting. So these are basically the different elements I can propose as an answer to the question ‘How to make things that are important to myself meaningful to us someone else?’