Personal Essay

Are People Investments Or Experiences?

What has life taught you?

Photo by The HK Photo Company on Unsplash

“I wasted so much time on that friendship.”

“Oh, if I had never crossed paths with them.”

“I cared about them so much, yet they cared so little.”

“I wish I had known before falling in love.”

We often say stuff like this after a relationship ends, when someone we love disappoints us, or when a bond sours. It feels like all the love we poured into a person, the secrets we shared, all the merry moments were a big fat lie, like it was all false. As if the other person knew all along that this was going to end, and they still strung us along.

And this thought rips our heart to pieces.

Some relationships don’t end badly; they just fizzle out and go flat like a can of Coke left open for days. We wonder what went wrong. Where did the magic go? How did the spark disappear? Did we mess things up? We can’t simply accept that the relationship probably reached its expiry date, and it expired, like it was always supposed to. Everything does, just like cans of Coke.

And we feel defeated, hopeless.

How you feel at the end of any relationship depends on this one question: Do you think people are investments or experiences?

Yes, it’s really as simple as that. If you think people are little piggy banks where we put all our love, care, and effort to feel their weight increase in our hands and anticipate a big reward one day, then at the end, you will most definitely feel robbed. Like you were scammed by promises of returns that never materialised.

Such is the pain of considering people as investments — containers for our joys and sorrows, vaults of memories, and hopes that the future will hold something better than the past.

But what if I told you it doesn’t work that way?

Some day we are going to have the best moment with someone we can ever have. Some day we will tell them our deepest, darkest secret, and then there will be no more secrets to share. Some day they will look at us with more awe and adoration than on any other day. Some day we will love them the most that we possibly can.

What if I told you something we all know but forget — we are not immortal, and our relationships are not infinite — that everything ends?

Here’s a kinder perspective of our lives and our time with others — people are experiences. They are for us to behold in the present, not to be saved up for the future. Our friends hold us through our sadness and laugh with us in our happiness; our lovers desire us with such burning passion that, for a moment, we feel more precious than all the diamonds in the world; our families give us a sense of belonging even if it is just for one evening.

Therein lies the beauty of people and indeed our relationships with them — they are meant to exist in the moment, experienced for what they are right here, right now. Hanging on to what they can be tomorrow or what they were yesterday automatically categorises them as investments, which inherently involve a profit-and-loss equation.

So experience the people in your life. And when they leave, don’t ask why; just bid them goodbye.

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