Excerpt: Peanut Butter: A Tale of Unrequited Love

My least favorite acting professor said once that humans always have objectives. It may seem like a common sense statement, but at the same time, it is an uncomfortable realization that everything that human beings ever do, they do because they ultimately want something from someone else. We try to pretend that we are selfless, but we are driven by what we want. Life is an endless game of manipulating the universe to produce the outcomes we want. The second point of this thought is that humans often want unreasonable or impossible things. We want to win the lottery. We want time to tick faster on a Monday. We want a friend to recover from death.

I use this philosophy when I teach role-plays to counselors. Recognizing all parties’ objectives is the first step to properly assessing the situation and developing an acceptable solution. I catch myself looking for other people’s objectives in my everyday life as well. I am more cautious to trust people when I know that ultimately they just want something from me. I am often embarrassed to act on my own desires, because I don’t want to be part of the web of manipulation in my pursuit of what I want. A part of me is embarrassed to be human.