To think that something I had struggled so hard to learn last year
could come to such an anticlimactic end without being put to use at all…
Could anything be more frustrating?
And unless I myself change,
unless I update myself,
I will probably keep repeating this same question in the future.

Looking back, for the past month, my mind has been somewhere else.
It is almost strange that, in practical terms,
so many individual matters actually went well.
I was painfully uncool,
and yet I could do nothing about it.

The difficulty of “unconditionally respecting the other person’s No.”
Of course, since I go so far as to describe myself as a human-rights advocate,
I assume that the minimum standard is naturally guaranteed.
What follows is a discussion built on that premise.

First of all, I cannot simply say, “I understand,”
and step back.
Even though this is precisely the subject I dealt with
in the screenplay for a short film selected by a Hollywood film festival—
wasn’t it two years ago that I wrote that script?

At the crucial points in my life,
I think my basic pattern has been,
while recognizing the other person’s rights,
“How can I get them to say Yes?”
It is personally disappointing beyond words
that this ability is never put to use in sales,
but in life as a whole—including all other kinds of work—
I take pride in having used that ability at full capacity.
Moreover, improving collective efficacy
is also my personal goal in life.
In any case, this is structurally the exact opposite
of “unconditionally respecting the other person’s No.”

So I look for room for discussion within that No
and try to find a way forward.
To me, it is meant to be a fair discussion,
but to the person on the receiving end,
does it already feel like violence?
I am someone who should have secured my own “No”
by desperately fighting against all kinds of pressure to conform.
How am I supposed to take the bitter irony
that I have become insensitive
to the pain of people in that position?

One answer is probably that
my “way of getting a Yes” is immature.
That is exactly my recent personal theme.
This is a question of cognitive warfare.
The biggest point is:
“Can I get the other person to understand
that I am not trying to change them?”
If I am not trying to change them,
then it should not become violence.
It would be more accurate to say that I hope they will change.
It is an extremely delicate distinction.
Still, I cannot deny that my consideration around this point is somewhat crude
and that I tend to resort to power plays.

The closer the relationship,
the stronger this tendency becomes.
In other words, I become emotional.
However much training I thought I had put in,
sadly, I could not control
the anxiety that swelled explosively inside me
or the desire to be understood.

It is easy to explain it in terms of development or attachment,
but the points for improvement are clear,
and I do not believe they are impossible to improve.
That does not contradict the fact that the difficulty is high.

When I cannot get a Yes—
in other words, is what I need to develop
the ability not to make the other person process
the anxiety that their No creates in me?

Still, as far as my intention went,
I had not meant to change the other person.
Even if selfish desire lay at the base of it,
I only wanted to make a proposal that would be constructive for both of us.
However, “constructive” is merely how it appears within my own cognition,
and at present I do not yet know
how it was evaluated within the other person’s cognition.
With the abilities I have,
it was impossible to process all of that
through text-based communication alone.

It was far too exact a replay
of the same pattern as always,
and that, too, is unbearably pathetic to me.
It is as though I have not grown at all.
And every time, it comes bundled
with bizarre, incomprehensible coincidences—
bad luck on what feels like an astronomical scale.

If reality has not changed,
does that mean I myself
remain trapped inside the status quo?

Then what, in fact, exists outside the status quo?
And who is there?
Is it because I have not fully seen that
that I have not fully grown?
Am I truly trying to see it?

The other day, half-jokingly,
I posted Tomabechi’s phrase,
“Elegant Mind Leadership.”
But perhaps the very idea of
“how to get a Yes”
belongs only inside the status quo now.
And this is different from an easy “letting go”
or “abandoning someone.”
Is the real question how vividly real I can make
“the strongest possible future”—
a future in which there is no need to fight the other person’s No?
I have raised many hypotheses,
but could this, perhaps, be the truth?

If so, does “respecting a No” mean
actually giving that No the power to stop reality?
Or is it indispensable
to go as far as making the other person perceive
that it truly has that power?
If that is so, is the pressure I exert simply too strong?
Does it all amount to another way of saying “safety”?
Is it about strengthening the self-efficacy of saying No?
And is the goal I should pursue
a future that will not break even when met with a No?

Tonight, too, my dialogue with AI is endless.