Do shared experiences make people bond?

Hello guys, a very important part of my blogging experience is the response I get from my regular readers. I think it is very interesting when I don't actually agree with what they say - don't get me wrong, it will rather boring if they all agreed with me and then there would be nothing for us to discuss after they have read the article. However, sometimes, someone can post something that I really disagree with so profoundly that I have to dedicate a blog post just to explain why I feel so strongly about the issue and I like using the format of a full blog post to do so rather than simply using the comments section. So, here's the comment from my reader Ruther which I profoundly disagreed with:

What was your NS experience like?

Regarding the NS part, it is important to know what your vocation is in order to know whether you can make friends easily. Because usually for tougher vocations likes commando, guards, infantry etc. you guys will have tough training and outfield whereby there are more common experiences shared amongst the men. Whereas for less tough vocations like supply assistant (storeman) and transport operator (driver), there are less common experiences due to less tough trainings and less or even no outfields. Hence, we will have the time and energy to play games and do our own stuff, which will result to only hanging with people of similar frequency. So what was your vocation during NS?

Firstly, I would like to state that this is by no means a personal attack on Ruther - I disagree with his opinion but I welcome him to express it in any case even if I do feel that he is wrong. I would thus like to explain why I disagree with him. For starters, I think he was completely barking up the wrong tree by asking me about my vocation during NS because he must have assumed that I had come to my conclusions based on my personal experiences. Now a good writer wouldn't and shouldn't fall into the trap of universalizing one's experience. Let me give you an example: imagine if  Gina went to Tunisia on holiday and met a charming local man at the bar whom she ends up spending a very pleasant evening with. She agrees to meet him the day after and they end up seeing each other a few more times whilst she is there. Gina then goes home and tells her friends that all Tunisian men are so incredibly handsome and charming. Now that's certainly not true: she met one man who charmed her off her feet, but she based her judgement on the issue on her personal experience. By all means, offering interesting personal anecdotes can certainly make a story come to live but one should never ever base an entire argument just on one's personal experience like that.

Never base your entire argument on your own experiences.

Likewise, yes I have blogged about NS on my blog quite a lot, but as a good writer, I would never write solely about my own experiences. I have drawn upon the experiences of others of different vocations and ranks, of my friends and my former colleagues - I have referred to high profile cases that have made the news and have even interviewed people about their NS experiences when they have done things that I have not done. Indeed, let me be the first to say this: everyone who has done NS has a different experience. So much of it is random: whom you end up living and working with, whom you end up befriending, what vocation you get assigned, whom you end up working for etc. We have little or no control over all of those factors, so I would never ever universalize my personal experiences and write a piece that is based entirely on my own personal experiences - no, that would make me a bad writer if I made such a mistake and for the record, I'm too good a writer to make that kind of amateur's mistake. So when Ruther asked me what my vocation was during NS, my reply is, "stop being condescending, I'm a much better writer than you think and this isn't about me. It is about the wider NS experience. I know what I am doing so do not assume that I'm making a mistake."

But allow me to go on, please. Ruther seems to think that shared experiences through extended training and 'outfield' exercises would make the men bond - now I beg to differ and I think Ruther is wrong. Sure you can subject the men in the army to long hours of training together, forcing them to spend a lot more time with each other during these 'outfield' exercises - but does that bring them any closer as friends? No, I don't think it does. Now, allow me to speak as an older man in his 40s who has a lot more than just my NS experience to draw upon: I have worked in companies where I have spent long hours working on projects with my team. I've worked 8 years in one company - that's far longer than any time you have served as a conscript doing NS. So, in this situation, we're talking about being forced to spend many working hours, week after week, month after month on the same project with a group of people - does that process make us any closer and help us bond as friends? No. Far from it. You can't assume that will happen.

Did you bond with the people you did NS with?

What I witnessed was that some colleagues clicked on some personal level because they had something in common: maybe they had the same kind of hobbies, maybe they had the same dark sense of humour, maybe they liked the same kind of sports or there was just some chemistry that allowed their friendship to flourish. But otherwise, even when there was no chemistry present for any kind of friendship to exist, most of us simply remained very professional and maintained a kind of cordial but formal working relationship with the rest of the team. I once had to worked with this older Russian lady - let's call her Elena. I realized that because of the huge differences in culture, I was never going to become her good friend and any over the top efforts to try to be her friend would just come across as awkward. Instead, I kept it formal and even though I worked closely with her for 8 years, we never ever grew any closer. We were at best colleagues, I wouldn't consider her my friend. I never once saw her outside the context of work for the 8 years we were colleagues. Heck, I never even had lunch with her once in those 8 years.

My point is simple: when you force people to work closely together for long hours over an extended period of time, they become very good at tolerating each other and maintaining a veneer of professional civility. This is a simple mechanism to reduce conflict and get work done, people often default to this modus operandi when placed in a challenging situation. I call it simply making the best of a bad situation. Would I choose to be Elena's friend if I had the choice? No. But we had to work together and I had to create a professional, civil working relationship with her as I had to see her everyday in the office. The common experience of working together on so many projects required us to have a good working relationship - but let's not confuse that with friendship but more to the point, the hours of meetings I shared with Elena, even the business trips we took together had failed to bring us together as friends.

After 8 years of working with Elena, we remained colleagues and never became friends.

In the context of NS, there's one other major factor that you need to consider: the near total absence of choice. We have this saying in the army, "it is not your grandfather's army" - that means you don't get a say, you do as you're told, don't question your instructions. Those serving NS simply have no choice over their vocations - they are assigned their vocations and all you can do is hope for the best whilst expecting the worst. When you complete your BMT, you receive your assigned vocation and it can be a total surprise that could leave you happy, worried, surprised, scared, apprehensive or all of the above, all at the same time. You then get on a truck and end up in another camp with a bunch of strangers all experiencing that crazy cocktail of emotions. Tentatively, you turn to the person next to you and hope to make a friend - oh yes, we've all been there. Now, I just so happen to have a group of friends who are veterinary students at RVC or are already qualified as vets.  They actually have a lot more in common because they all chose to go down this road as vets: they are first and foremost united by a love for animals and if you wanna talk about shared experiences, then yeah vets do have that on the basis of their long training process. But I stress - they chose to be vets and the fact that they all chose to make the same choice unites them.

Even if you find people who did like their vocation, it still wasn't something they chose to do because one simply does not have the luxury of choosing one's vocation in NS. As a civilian today, I have the luxury of choice in my daily life: I can choose where I want to live, whether I want to rent or get on the property ladder. I can choose what kind of company I want to work for, what kind of career I want. I can choose whom I want to make friends with and what kind of social circle I wish to create. I can choose what I want to wear tomorrow or where I want to go for lunch. As a soldier serving NS, you have none of that choice: your vocation is assigned to you, your living quarters are assigned to you and the SAF decides when you get to go home on the weekend and when you have to report back by. You are told whom you have to work with and how you're supposed to work with them. You get no choice over attire as you're given a uniform and whilst the food is free, you don't get to decide what's on the menu. You must eat what you're given.

Not your grandpa's army!

You see, I take issue with Ruther's theory that if you force a group of men to spend more time training and working together, that shared experience will make them bond. You see, I just don't buy that. That's a very passive approach to the issue - that's imagining that men can be moulded by the system and it is at best, a rather idealistic, romantic view of things. Wanna make this group of men bond? Simple make them spend time together - and if they're not bonding yet? Make them spend even more time together until they bond. I simply don't believe that human relations are that simple, that you can force people to bond and become friends like that. My alternative theory in response to Ruther's postulation is that some guys go into NS with a positive attitude and even if they find themselves in a 'shiong' vocation which involves a lot of hardship, they take it on the chin and say, "hey, let's be positive and optimistic about this: I am sure will learn a lot from this experience and it will be good for me." So even when they endure hardship, they put a positive spin on it and imagine that this shared experience will create some kind of bond with others who are going through the same shit - but that ignores one crucial factor: our emotional response as individuals to events.

Allow me to explain: you can subject a whole group of people to the same kind of prolonged training period and plenty of 'outfield' exercises (as described by Ruther), they will still not all have the same experience. You could subject 100 people to the same experience such as sending them on a long, grueling outfield exercise and get a wide range emotional responses to it. Some guys may treat it as the adventure of a life time and have a lot of fun whilst others may miss the comforts of home or their loved ones, thus hating every moment of it. The same experience can illicit a very different response from different experiences - thus that shared experience will not bond the different individuals involved unless you have some degree of similarity in your emotional response to it. I'm not saying that it is not possible but let's not ignore this factor by assuming that everyone will have the same emotional response when we're all unique individuals. In fact, a very different emotional response to the same experience may be a barrier to bonding.  Allow me to give you an example about different emotional responses, not from NS but from my working life.

What is your emotional response to BMT?

In this company where I worked some years back, I had this colleague - let's call him William. Him and I worked on the same team and whilst we had little in common, we did establish a cordial and civil working relationship which was a bit formal but never antagonistic. There was a nasty woman in the office - let's call her Ms Snake as she was a snake in the grass, that's how sneaky she was. We worked in sales then and Ms Snake had sneaked up on William and I quite a few times and stole deals right out of our hands - her tactic was simple: when she knew we were working on a deal with company ABCD, she would then contact them as well and when the deal materialized, she would claim, "hey I was speaking to the people at ABCD as well, I want a share of the commission." The bosses often sided with Ms Snake because she was great at sales and they didn't want to lose her. William eventually left the company because he couldn't deal with a colleague like Ms Snake - he did run to me for help several times and I guess we were both trying to make the best of a bad situation. After all, we both hated Ms Snake and knew she was trouble.

We were faced with the same problem: Ms Snake. We both hated her. We found ourselves in an unholy alliance which I can only describe as "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Usually, we rarely talked to each other but now, he was pulling me aside and saying, "Alex, could we chat for a moment this lunchtime? Let's go to the local coffee shop please. I want to share with you what Ms Snake is up to and was wondering if you were aware of it." Now this is where we parted company. I thought the way to deal with it was to cover your tracks, speak in another language (whoops - William was monolingual) so Ms Snake couldn't overhear your conversations, work from home away from the office and throw her a few false leads - pretend that you're about to close a big deal with company WXYZ when they have already said no, so you will send Ms Snake on a wild goose chase trying to track down whom the decision maker is at WXYZ: fight fire with fire, give her a taste of her own medicine. William disagreed - he thought I was playing her game and he wanted me to join him in confronting the management about Ms Snake's unethical ways and he expected them to police the situation much like a primary school teacher in a playground. I told him it wasn't going to happen - they like Ms Snake too much and they were going to let her get away with murder as long as her sales figures were good.

William and I couldn't agree on what to do about Ms Snake.

So, there you are: William and I were working together in the same company, facing the same problem, in the same challenging situation, facing a common enemy in the form of Ms Snake. Yet our emotional responses were so different. My attitude was, "if you can't beat her, join her - do things her way and let's see how can be more devious, maybe you can even make her realize you're not the kind of person she should mess with if you can fuck her up and she will leave you alone, but such is the world of sales for you. She is pretty typical, not everyone is as honest as you." Whereas William, well, he just could bring himself to compromise on his principles when it comes to integrity and honesty and he couldn't accept that the management really didn't care how Ms Snake did her deals, as long as she was making a lot of money for the company. My refusal to do things William's way did cause a rift: quite simply, I had a different emotional response to the situation and he tried but failed to convince me to do things his way. That did frustrate him admittedly but it was nothing personal, we're just very different people despite the fact that we worked together for some years in the same job, in the same environment. The shared experience failed to make us bond because of this huge difference in our emotional responses to what we encountered together. William and I eventually both left that company. I ran into him once at a train station in London some years back and chatted a little - but we've not make any kind of real effort to keep in touch. There's no animosity at all between William and I - we're just two guys who worked together for many years but failed to bond despite everything we experienced together.

Sometimes life can throw you a curved ball and you can force two people to go through the same bad experience and they not emerge as best friends if they simply turn against each other under pressure and I invite you to read this true story I witnessed of one such incident. It is a pressure cooker situation - these more 'shiong' vocations that Ruther refers to are no fun at all - they are not holiday camps at the seaside, they are challenging at the best of time: you work very hard with a bunch of guys you may have nothing in common with, you're in an unfamiliar environment, you miss the comforts of home and you're probably sleep deprived most of the time. I've talked about people making the best of a bad situation and emerging 'intact' from the experience, but I also have plenty of stories of  people who simply crack under pressure when placed in such very challenging circumstances and they react with a toxic mix of irrationality, spite, anger and malice. Believe me, it's not just in NS when seemingly normal people crack under pressure like that. It can happen in school, at university or in the workplace when people can't handle the pressure.

Anyone can crack under pressure - it's not right but it happens.

Ruther made the assumption that the shared experience (in the form of the difficult circumstances) will somehow force the men to bond, seeking comfort in each other's company and help each other through those very hard challenges at work. Oh in an ideal world, sure that would be nice, wouldn't it? But anyone who has served NS would tell you that the social dynamics amongst the men are tricky at the best of times and there are plenty of instances of people not getting along. And no amount of making the men work together for long hours is going to iron out those differences: if anything, it merely makes the situation worse as they are forced to tolerate each other for long whilst rubbing each other up the wrong way constantly, hour after hour, day after day. Whilst most people would usually choose to bear with it, let's not mistake tolerating someone you hate as a sign of friendship or bonding. Hell no, we choose not to beat up the bastard we hate simply because assault is a serious crime and we do not want to go to jail over losing our tempers. No, it's not worth it. And thus we have this status quo as a result of people making the best of a bad situation.

So that's it from me on this issue. What do you think about it guys? Does a shared experience invetiably make people bond or are we really still looking for people who are on the same wavelengths as ourselves on an emotional level? Or am I simply too cynical - is the shared experience of 'making the best of a bad situation' enough to bring us together at some level? Do let me know your thoughts on this issue, leave a comment below and let's chat about it, especially if you have served NS and can talk about the friends you have made during your NS stint. Many thanks for reading.