Is it true that, as the Beatles said, all you need is love?

Maybe love can’t be all you need. Maybe love isn’t the answer, but it is certainly an answer. An answer to what exactly?

Perhaps an answer to one of the biggest questions every human must face: How do I conduct myself in this world?

This includes how we treat other people, ourselves, and how we think about the impact of our actions over time.

Maybe love is the answer. Let’s explore.

What is Love?

Love can be defined in many ways. A common definition I found is “an intense feeling of deep affection”. I like to think of it more broadly, however. I sometimes think of compassion, or simply wishing well toward someone else. I also think of love as attention, though that is just a bit too broad.

Perhaps my view of love is best seen through the Buddhist term Metta. Often translated as loving-kindness, Metta means: “to care and wish well for another being without judging them, to accept them independently of agreeing or disagreeing with them, and without wanting anything from them in return.” Metta is simply the desire for others to be happy and free from suffering.

What one soon finds if they practice Metta meditation — where you focus your attention not on the breath, or the position of your body, but on this feeling of goodwill and loving-kindness — is that a selfless desire for others to be happy actually triggers peace and joy within yourself. It feels great to connect with the idea that you genuinely want others (and yourself) to be free from suffering.

With that in mind, let’s look more closely at how we interact with others in the world.

The Implicating Gaze

We view ourselves in relation to other people. Self-referential thought — thinking about ourselves— emerged in our species because it was adaptive for us to be able to think about how others see us. We need a representation of ourselves, of how we look and how our actions are perceived by others, in order to function in groups. To have relationships with others. To identify dangerous situations, or to enter into beneficial partnerships.

On the pro side, thinking about how we are viewed by others is great for helping our behaviors align with social norms. It keeps our behaviors from straying into social gray areas, and it helps us interact meaningfully and productively with others.

On the con side, using our attention to evaluate how others see us is the root of much neuroticism, anxiety, and doubt. And these negative emotions can lead to fear and isolation.

Self-consciousness, while useful and necessary, can be extremely unhealthy.

Mental Models

We have a representation of how we look to the outside world. But it isn’t that simple. That is our model of ourselves. But everyone else sees the world in a different way. Each person has different information, a different background, different biases, and prejudices. Every person will see us differently and form their own unique mental model of us.

So for every person we see, we have to form a mental model of how they view us. A model of their model of us. We have to try to incorporate what they know about us, past experience we have shared, and attitudes that they may have toward us. We then use that model as a guide for how to behave.

Let’s use a hyperbolic example to demonstrate.

I see a strange man who looks incredibly angry, veins popping out on his forehead, wearing a shirt that says I hate people who write blogs and wear red shirts, and he turns his gaze toward me… I look down and I’m wearing a red shirt. Uh-oh. My reaction isn’t going to be one of comfort and safety. My brain is automatically deciding what his view of me is likely to be. In the blink of the eye, my mind is constructing a mental model of that person’s brain. It is trying to determine what HIS mental model of me will be. Using what data I have, I will decide whether that person sees me as a friend, an enemy, a threat, or perhaps doesn’t notice me at all.

In this case, because there are so many negative signals from this blog-hating man, my mental model of his mental model of me is telling me that I might be viewed as an enemy.

How does that process affect my behavior and my emotions?

It will perhaps make me afraid, alert, and hyper self-conscious. Now that I have identified this person as a threat, I am seeing the world through his eyes. I am thinking of every move I make in terms of how he will see it, and whether that might incite an attack.

Even if that isn’t what I’m thinking consciously, that is the physiological pathway that is being activated. Self-referential thought evolved to protect us from dangerous situations, and this process of threat-detection is deeply ingrained. Defensive patterns of thought and behavior will arise whether we are conscious of them or not.

This encounter with an angry man is an extreme example to drive home the point, but this same dynamic is happening in every single social interaction. It is how we function in society. It is why the person you are at home — the way you behave — is different than the person you are when you grocery shop, or the person you are when you are at a dinner with family.

With some people, we are “more ourselves” and with others, we change “ourselves” dramatically. You would do some things at home with your best friend that you would not do in a crowd of strangers, and vice versa.

We are created by our interactions with others.

Even if the “threat” of the other person’s gaze doesn’t activate our full fight or flight response, it does activate self-referential thinking. This ego-driven thinking that causes us to worry, to feel anxious, and to then act from a place of caution and discomfort. That self-reference keeps us from acting from a place of security and comfort.

So Mr. Blog-Hater shows us one extreme of social interaction. What happens at the other end of the spectrum?

The Loving Gaze

You are in an environment where you feel totally safe. Maybe your living room, or your favorite coffee shop. You are only with your best friends, friends you’ve had for years. Friends who have seen you at your best and worst, and accepted it all. Friends who love you.

They are all in a great mood, laughing and joking and smiling. No one has a care in the world. You know that no one will judge you for anything you say or do.

Your mental model of them will include the way that they see you. At this moment, you will likely feel that they see you with love, warmth, and compassion. They want what’s best for you and nothing else. They want you to be happy and free from suffering.

Your mental model of their mental model of you is one of acceptance and love. This creates feelings of safety and security.

Remember, our self-referential thought is there to protect us. It is there to warn us about threats; to help us anticipate danger to our physical self or our social standing in a group. Ego-driven thinking helps regulate our behavior to make us more fit to pass on our genes, as all evolutionarily selected processes do. In an environment that avoids activating any notions of danger, you decrease the level of ego-activation.

You are able to think about yourself less. You free up attention to be directed outward. You are more authentically you, whatever behaviors and thoughts and emotions that may include.

So, with these two examples to highlight the extremes of human interaction, let’s relate this to the idea that love might be an answer to the question of how to live best in this world.

The Benefit of Turning Attention Outward

The two scenarios described above deal with how other people view you. More specifically, they deal with your perception of how other people view you.

Ultimately, we can never actually know what other people are thinking. We are very bad at predicting how other people see us, and we are riddled with cognitive biases that will distort our efforts to understand them.

Not only is our view of others often inaccurate, but it’s also pessimistic.

Our biases are formed by evolution and therefore are skewed toward the negative. Historically, assuming that others are threats is a better way to survive and pass on your genes. You will be more cautious, more fearful, and more likely to identify and avoid danger. However, in our current environment, this basic animalistic programming might be causing us more harm than good.

That being said, you can’t control what other people think. Sure, you can try, but we are already bad at predicting what other people think, so we will likely be even worse at changing how they think. What can we actually do?

We can change the way we think of others.

This is where the idea of love, of Metta, of wanting others to be happy comes in. I can control my own thoughts to some extent, at least to a much greater extent than I can control someone else’s. I can look at someone, a friend or a stranger, and occasionally think: “I want you to be happy”.

I can do this formally through Metta meditation, a form of meditation which is easy to practice and often more immediately rewarding than other forms of meditation.

I can do this informally by noticing the way I react to others and treating them as if they are my friend. By staying in touch with the fact that I truly do want them to be happy, safe, and healthy. That they are a complex human being whether I know them or not, and I have nothing but good intentions toward them.

Now, this is the really cool part: Simply by doing this, you can decrease your level of self-consciousness. Remember, the basic concept here is that if you are around others that you perceive as threatening, you will have more self-referential thought. You will be more anxious, less comfortable, and more self-critical.

When you practice viewing others in a loving way, it becomes difficult for you to simultaneously view them as a threat. You downregulate that automatic fight or flight response, the alarm bells that ring in the background telling you to be on alert. You will naturally feel safer, more comfortable, and less self-conscious.

Put another way, if you can change the way you perceive others, by spreading thoughts of love toward them, you change the way you perceive that they perceive you. By changing your mental model of them, you will naturally change your mental model of their mental model of you.

Simply with thought, you can change potential enemies into friends.

Seeing Reality Clearly

Now, some skeptical readers might view this as distorting reality: putting on rose-colored glasses to make yourself feel better. However, if we take into account the negativity bias and numerous other cognitive biases built into us by evolution, we can see it’s exactly the opposite.

Our perception of reality is reflexively distorted to appear much more negative and dangerous than it actually is. Evolution programmed us this way for survival. However, that way of viewing the world is not very useful anymore, and it is not accurate. Despite the constant fear-mongering of the media to attract views and clicks, we live in the safest time in human history.

Think about a common interaction you might have with a stranger. You are in line at the store. Or walking past someone on the street. What are the odds that someone means you harm?

Most likely, your average stranger barely notices you, and if they do, it is only in passing. As you probably know from examining your own experience, pretty much everyone is lost in thought most of the time, and you spend a fairly small portion of your time actually judging and remembering strangers that you briefly interact with.

Of those who actually do notice or consider you, the vast majority are normal well-meaning individuals like yourself. Again, we live in the safest period of human history, and crime is the exception, not the rule. It sticks out in our mind because of our negativity bias and our inability to rationally incorporate statistics into our worldview.

Despite this knowledge, it is common to feel embarrassed if we trip in public, or spill something on ourselves. It is easy to view others as dangerous; as if our social status or safety is in constant jeopardy when we are around others. But no one is keeping a ledger of your failures and triumphs. No one is writing down the number of stains on your shirt.

Not everywhere is safe. There are of course still violent countries, neighborhoods, and situations where a more cautious state of mind will be necessary and beneficial. But the majority of people are still viewing their world through an evolutionary and media-reinforced lens of danger most of the time, and that paradigm simply does not align with reality.

Maybe love is one way to see the world more clearly.

This Is Your Brain on Love

I have thus far laid out that utilizing love to change the way you view others might have many positive effects on you: less self-consciousness and anxiety, feelings of safety and security in your environment, and a more accurate view of reality. Why stop there though? Let’s keep adding on to the love train with a few more benefits.

Almost all of our negative behaviors come from suffering, anxiety, and fear. These emotions activate the ego, the focal point of self-centered thinking, which then mediates negative actions. This is how behaviors like greed, selfishness, jealousy, anger, and cruelty arise. Reality is filtered through a lens of anxiety and fear and transmuted by the ego into a way to deal with that anxiety, often with maladaptive and self-defeating coping mechanisms that lead to more suffering for ourselves and others.

If you view others with love instead of fear, you bypass this ego activation. You act in a way that aligns more with reality. You act from a place of selflessness instead of ego-driven selfishness. This means that not only will love improve your inner sense of safety and peace, but it will change your actions in a positive way as well.

While this correlation between love and positive behavior seems intuitive, I think some examples help make the association more clear. When you think of people who embody love and goodwill, who comes to mind? The Dalai Lama. Mother Teresa. Nelson Mandela. Mahatma Gandhi.

People who were known for their actions, for their positive impact in the world. Love changes the way you see the world, and that changes the way you act in it. By changing our thoughts, by practicing Metta and love, we change our behaviors.

So let’s take this idea one step further. Earlier I asserted that we can’t control what other people think of us, so we should spend our energy changing the way we think of them. But what if the way you think of them changes the way they think of you?

A Chain Reaction

If I connect with a feeling of love and goodwill toward the people I interact with, that will change my behaviors, as we discussed above. A worldview centered around wanting the best for people will very often change your actions to align with that worldview. Ideas are the engines of behavior. Thought leads to action.

So when I interact with people from a place of love, some of that will bleed through into my actions. What does that do to other’s representations of me?

We truly cannot control what someone else thinks: everyone is unique and people’s perspectives can vary widely. However, we can be rational and use what we know about human psychology to make some predictions. If you act toward people from a place of love, many of those people will pick up on that, consciously or unconsciously. As they are forming and updating their mental model of you, it will incorporate your actions. If those actions come from love, their model of you will slowly shift toward “that is someone who loves me”.

Maybe that’s going too far for most encounters. But their model will at least shift away from viewing you as an enemy or a potential threat. It is difficult to see someone treating you as a friend and yet still view them as a threat. The cognitive dissonance it creates is unpleasant and unsustainable.

This is exemplified by the famous photograph below of a Vietnam War protestor placing a carnation into a soldier’s rifle.

How could a soldier become violent toward a person armed with nothing but flowers? How could they view them as an enemy when they are clearly showing signs of love and friendship?

As discussed above, the benefits that come when we view others as friends instead of threats are enormous. When you make someone feel comfortable and safe, they act from a place of security, not one of fear and anxiety.

By putting out love, you get love back. Not only that, but that interaction bleeds into other areas. If you have a positive interaction one moment, the next interaction you have is more likely to be positive. This is intuitive, but can also be explained by the psychological phenomenon of priming, where “exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention”.

Seeing someone as a friend makes you more likely to view the next person you see as a friend. If you help someone see you as a friend, they are more likely to view the next person they meet as a friend. They reap all the benefits of less ego-activation discussed above, and their mindstate and actions will change accordingly.

It’s a chain reaction.

Conclusion

Is love the answer? I actually think it might be. This way of viewing the world so fundamentally changes our psyche in a positive way that it’s hard to not view it as a powerful guiding principle for how to act in the world.

A few takeaways from these ideas:

Even a cursory practice of Metta meditation can be extremely valuable. Spend a moment bringing to mind a friend, an enemy, a stranger, or yourself. Think thoughts like “May you be happy”, “May you be free from suffering”, “May you live with ease”, “May you be healthy”. Connect with the fact that you genuinely want the best for these people. See how it makes you feel. At the times when you are most stressed, anxious, angry, or resonate with these sentiments the least… maybe that’s when the practice can be the most beneficial.

Community is important. While I advocate strongly for cultivating the ability to view everyone with Metta, I accept that this will always be easier with some people than others. The people you surround yourself with will largely create the person you are. If you spend time with people you feel comfortable with and love effortlessly, you will reap those benefits. But even if we can’t reach Mother Teresa levels of love and acceptance for all, we can take steps to establish community wherever we are. Introducing yourself to people in your neighborhood, office, school, or gym. Change your model of those people from “stranger” and therefore “potential threat” to “acquaintance” or possibly even “friend”. Change your environment to change yourself.

A final related thought, in the form of a piece of advice I’ve heard many times in the past: If you are having trouble making yourself happy, make someone else happy. See what happens.

Love might not be the answer in every situation, but damn is it worth a try.