Theory: Why no one likes the word ‘special’.

We live in a world where unfortunately people think about themselves or how they can reap the benefits of doing something for others in their favor. You’d like to think people are more selfless, but in reality every selfless act is selfish. You might’ve heard that paraphrased in an episode of Friends where Joey proves that there is no such thing as a selfless act. The good news is that even if there is no selfless actions we still have ‘good intentions’.

Good intentions is a ‘plan’ to do good. You can’t ‘be’ good, but you can ‘do’ good. Just the ways of life if you’re into definitions of things and proper usage of the terms.

Here at Quarter Circle Fun (QCF), I — Samy Salti — have decided to create a platform for creators and creatives to have their content shown using the brand of QCF. My intention is to make sure people fulfill their passions to become whatever creative medium they want fulfilled to be a successful one (or at least be on the verge of it). The best part is that there are absolutely ‘no strings attached’ meaning if people want to use QCF to just build an audience they can leave after their goal has been reached. My intentions leads to a good intention (if I say so myself) for people who are selfish themselves, because there is a simple trick to how they’re being taken slight advantage of, they’re helping the creators who haven’t fulfilled their goal to eventually reach it. It’s sort of a ‘win-win’ scenario for all parties.

Now you are probably wondering why would you want to treat the small creators as special people? That is actually quite simple really, because people normally don’t give a damn about them, so someone has to help them out. The business may fall because of the intention to help this particular group of creatives, but the way I see it is that a business only generates an outcome, and if that goal is reached then it’s a successful business. Even though the world revolves around money I can at least say the business was a success upon its dying breath, y’know?

As you can tell, I’m not a normal business man at all. Money is just an after thought for me, because ‘a push’ is all a person really needs in the end of the day. Business is just an activity with a sort of profit in the end of the day. The profit I rather have is for the small creators to continue with their passions without restraint. I don’t treat money with an special purpose other than providing options for whatever I see fit. In a way, I despise it.

People treat money as if it’s really special, and sure, I won’t stop them from treating whatever they want as such, but it’s way too privileged. I like money don’t get me wrong, yet we equate it to offering happiness where we fail to see what we can offer it to make people happy. We buy happiness and its sort of upsetting that we can’t be away from money, does that make sense? Am I making sense? We can probably argue money is good and bad, again… Money is an intention, because it offers options. Options are actions with choice in mind.

Carrying on with my theory (as the the title suggests) after that really long introduction, but I wanted to make sure you guys understood where my mindset is coming from — even if you disagree with it, but at least you have a definitions. The word special, we seem to associate the term with a meaning that can either rattle or favor [us]. I can simply say something like, “I bought a Nintendo Switch for $329 during a special sale”, and depending on whether you also got the sale you’d be really happy. If you did not get the sale on special, you’d be pretty pissed. Now depending on the type of person you are (or you may know), chances are there’ll be a demand to get something you did not get because an opportunity was missed. We all like special deals, we all want to save money, and we all want to be treated likewise like our counterparts (or non-associated counterparts). So what happens when we don’t get what we want? We get pissed, right? We start saying, “[so and so] got treated, why aren’t I?”. We start acting very selfish because the intention was to have something good happen in our favor.

Way before I considered myself a creative I was often suggest by many to use my talents to make something of myself or utilize it for a career. Needless to say I’ve followed said advice and the sad thing is that I’m providing free content for these people, and asking for donations (just to make a living) is seen as frowned upon. The funny bit is that these people would still pay for big name companies to fulfill the same service I can provide them. I get it though, they have quality, but I have a vision that I want to be fulfilled so I can have my intentions met for the sake of every type of creative down the line. This paragraph turned into a rant, but it’s the fact that being treated differently and having special treatment gets thrown around here.

A lot of you also are thinking (if you’ve managed to read this far — thanks) this guy has the “why me?” attitude, and that’s another example of special. No one wants to hear another person complain about something, because then it’s all about the person complaining. “I don’t have time to deal with this” you’re probably thinking, but it proves my point that unfortunately the term special ‘is an intention’ that leads us to believe we are selfish and selfless at the same time and we don’t know how to treat it. We’re running circles around the thought process of “oh shut up!” and “I want to help”, but in fact we want to complain ourselves.

The thought process of this theory actually stemmed from COVID-19 and how people who are heavily against treating it like a global pandemic and not the common flu, because it’s special. The fact that any person gets annoyed by COVID-19 is purely because it’s just talked about so often. People will say, “it’s a lie”, “it’s just like every other disease”, and “car accidents kill more people than COVID-19 does”. Talking about it will only make people rant and be angry anyways, but my point is, is that people really don’t like the word special at all. It’s always been a word people can never truly appreciate unless it’s in favor of their beliefs, an action, or saving pocket change.

Speaking of change (not the pocket change thing I referred to last paragraph), but did you know that if we treat anything special we change an outcome of a specific intention? Yeah, we also don’t like change either. See, with change we’re also giving the intention of making something have another outcome we’re either in favor for or not. If we’re not changing our behavior we don’t get treated for anything special. A scenario like going to your work and you need to kiss your boss’ ass because if you don’t you aren’t going to get that promotion, so you have to change your behavior and treat that person like they are special. In the end of the day you go behind your boss’ back and change your behavior to being a person who dislikes them, because if you didn’t the intention of growing or getting more money can provide more options for yourself.

All this is a cynical way of looking at the word special and I can probably give more examples, like, if notice a special needs person you often look away, but it comes down to what type of intention you want to treat yourself with or others. The other person will usually always think on why something or someone is being treated anymore special because they don’t like the word at all. It just goes to show what bad intentions we can have as people, but we always have those who will always ‘do’ good.