I was talking to another patient of mine the other day and we came to the topic of how people take relationships these days. Not simply boyfriend-girlfriend kind of relationships, but relationships of all kinds, husbands and wives, parents and children, between siblings, between friends, between acquaintances, between co-workers, between anyone and yourself.

“Busy” is the keyword being overused and the shield to bring connections to the minimal. In today’s context, “I am busy” can sincerely mean “I am really caught up with matters that I need to attend to right now and may we postpone to another time”, but “busy” can also mean “you are not on my priority list”, “I have other things more important than attending to you”, or maybe just maybe “you are not useful to me”.

I believe most of us have experiences of being thrown in the face and brushed aside with the golden word “busy”. The feeling, of course, is nothing near to comfortable. But it is not just about using the word to keep someone else from bothering you, it is about the attitude we put towards relationships with others.

If you know that this person has title or status or money or whatever you need, will you even dare to use this 4 letter word on him? You will have rescheduled, recalendared, readjust everything in your life to meet the needs and requests that this person pose for you.

And quoting my patient who puts it really well this phenomenon:

Relationships have become transactional.

We no longer gather, no longer catch up, no longer talk to find out how each other has been, no longer care, because there is always something else that are more important than maintaining relationships. People only care to expense their energy on the RIGHT relationships which indirectly will benefit them somewhere in the future.

It is but really disappointing that we as a society have degraded to such a state.

As a doctor, one of the physician’s pledge is “I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient”. Which means we cannot pick and choose who to help, which trains us to view all humanity as equal and treat everyone in our journey as important.

As we progress in societal economic efficiency, a lot of traditional values and virtues (such as equality in this context) have been ignored, scraped, overwritten because we have supposedly higher (monetary) goals and purposes to achieve. And these values and virtues seemingly cannot be exchanged for money. But maybe we should all just reflect that