Why Loved Ones Do Not Want to Listen Even When You Want to Help

AVAlexander Volchek

You are developing, but your loved one is not. At least, that is how it seems to you. You read books, take courses, go on retreats, and want to share what you have understood. You are certain: “I just want to help this person.” An interesting question arises: what is happening between you at that moment? Are you simply sharing something that has become personally important to you, or are you quietly beginning to decide how the other person should live and develop, what they need to know and understand, and what direction they should look in? At some point, a sincere desire to share turns into pressure or an attempt to reshape someone close to you to suit yourself. In this episode, we will explore what really lies behind advice and how to talk about important things without damaging closeness. The question is: how do you share your discoveries without becoming a teacher to a loved one? Where is the line between a sincere wish to share and an attempt to change someone to fit your new idea of the right way to live? The key here is that we are not discussing what it means to be a student or a teacher. We are discussing the social role of a teacher. The question begins with a marriage.

This is remarkable. Through this question I will raise a very broad subject today, a significant observation. Imagine a marriage in which a husband and wife say to each other, “Listen, you should not treat me as though you are my manager at work, my teacher, or my student.” Suppose the wife teaches at a school and the husband comes home from a factory job. She sincerely does not want him to be her student at home. Sometimes it is the reverse: the husband comes home and says, “I do not want you to treat me like the children in your school.” This situation encompasses life across the whole planet. People do not want the other person to be a student, teacher, employee, subordinate, or manager. A business partner? No, not a business partner. What, then? A husband or wife. From the outset, people want to play a particular role or want the other person to play one. I once had an interesting experience that I looked at a little differently just a few days ago. An interesting person, close to me in the context of psychotherapy, said, “Alexander, do you realize that if your wife became interested in certain things, she would move away from some of her own duties or habits?

For example, taking full responsibility, one hundred percent, at any moment for wiping a child's bottom.” I am using that as an illustration, one end of the range. In other words, always dealing with any issue for the child. “What would you do? If necessary, you would resolve the situation differently. You would make the right decision for yourself. You could go and open the door for the child yourself, or ask your wife, who would always do it. But you could also find forty-eight other ways to have someone open that door. You would choose, while your wife would not choose; she would do it herself.” I spent a long time observing that situation and question. A few days ago, a simple thing dawned on me: it makes absolutely no difference to me what happens. This is all abstract reasoning: who will open the door for the child, or who will or will not spend time with me whenever I want or feel like it. I can have a whim and invite my wife to dinner or to go somewhere at any time. In ninety-nine percent of cases, she will agree.

If she invites me, I have a great many options. But if we look at the situation itself, she agrees because she wants to. If my wife does not want something, she will never agree. She is very unlikely to agree to do something she does not want to do. When I do not agree, it is because I see another option and do not want that either. But I look very seriously at whether the other person wants it, and I am often willing to accommodate them too. In our situation, it is not at all clear who is more willing to do household tasks or fulfill the other's wishes. Who is more open is a big question. So who is whose teacher? Let's leave roles aside for now; we will need them to resolve this topic. How do we compare people at all? The question mentioned a sincere desire to share. What assumption is the person making? That if someone studies something, they become a teacher to the other person.

Who told you that reading eighty books makes you smarter than your husband or wife? Who told you that starting sixteen businesses makes you more developed than your spouse? Who told you that personally giving birth to fifteen children makes you wiser about raising or approaching children than your husband? Of course it does not. Who told you that you are more developed? Can someone attend countless courses and training programs, do a great deal, while another person does none of it, and still be less developed? Of course that can happen. Take the ages of ten to twenty and thirty to forty. Between ten and twenty, a child takes in far more information and knowledge through education. Are they more developed than someone between thirty and forty? People usually say, “Of course not. They are a child.” But they are studying. Does that mean some people will study for decades and never even come close to others who apparently spend no time on it?

Of course it does. This is crucial to remember when we return to how we deal with roles. If you want to relate to your husband or wife according to their role, your understanding of it, and the restrictions you place on them—so they do not speak to you as a teacher, student, employee, or boss; so they do not speak to you as they do to a store clerk, but differently; so they do not speak to you as they do to children, but as a wife or husband—you should at least recognize that you want to restrict who that person really is. You want to limit them, silence them, change them, fit them to your own circumstances, reshape them to suit you. That is no longer a question of teacher or student. It is a question of a pet dog and a collar. That is why there is so much talk in society about letting the dog sleep in the bed too.

All of this is getting carried away with different things and failing to understand that a dog is a dog and a person is a person. Some people know how to live with dogs but not with other people. Some treat their cats well while endlessly bringing hostility, envy, and suffering to others. Or they treat other people like cats, dogs, fish, or hamsters. They do not relate to them as people at all.

Not at all, not as people. So whether I study and go on retreats, read many books, attend a course at Stanford, or take classes in painting or playing the piano, that does not prevent me from relating naturally to someone with the full richness of all that knowledge. But it also does not set me apart or separate me from them. Someone has simply gone somewhere and wants to share it all. Why? To show how smart they are, increase their own importance, and display their ego more broadly. My wife recently showed me a video—I happened to see it with her—in which her friends and mine, couples in Moscow, were sitting and watching another video. A friend of my wife's was in that video. I asked, “What is it?” She said, “They filmed this friend at work for a work-related video, and everyone sat down to watch it.”

They all sat down to watch a video featuring their friend. It brought up a very interesting inner feeling in me. For one person, appearing in a work video that two or ten people might see can mean far more than a video of someone else that ten thousand people see. Even for the other people, simply watching it can mean much more. It was like my grandmother. When I visited my paternal grandparents, there was a newspaper clipping behind the glass where they kept their books, with a picture of my father. I think it was a German newspaper. Just a piece of a newspaper; we do not even know which one. Was it a German newspaper the whole world saw? I do not know what they have—Deutsche Welle or “Press,” I do not know. Or a local newspaper for a community of five people? Or an internal company paper no one ever saw? What kind of paper was it? But what importance did it have, sitting behind that glass, for those parents?

Take my own newspaper coverage. I produce a great deal of content and have given an enormous number of interviews. How many magazines have written about me? To some people it is nothing, of course, but there has been plenty of coverage in Vedomosti, Forbes, and Kommersant. How much of it has nothing to do with the people close to me? You end up worrying not about having mountains of newspapers piled up, but about people not being proud of it all, for example. Here is what matters: it is not the number, volume, or quality. It is the feeling. The whole truth lies in the feeling, in that newspaper behind the glass. That is interesting. I am creating many different resources of my own now, because I am deeply involved in the technology industry and various businesses. There is a lot going on. My work requires me to create press releases and descriptions of myself on different social platforms, of different kinds. Describing yourself on LinkedIn is one thing; sometimes you need a résumé, or you need to introduce yourself to a business community.

Another situation is leading a program where people come to learn from you, or holding a spiritual retreat. An interesting point: I noticed something I have been thinking about, just now, even when I went to the bathroom, I think, and last night. I am rewriting a lot for my website and its structure with artificial intelligence, which reworks enormous amounts of text for me. AI reminds me of my editors: they see only a part. They always see a part and try to fit the person into a standard mold, to decide who that person is. What kind of individual are they? Yesterday Claude Design was designing a page of my site—actually, it was not a website, and it was not Claude Design; it was ChatGPT 5.6 Sol. It was writing a press release for a well-known global AI company about my project ToTheMoon, where we discuss artificial intelligence, to show that we are a major media outlet. In describing it, it first tried to turn me into a blogger. Then it said, “No, you are not just a blogger. You are an entrepreneur, a blogger-entrepreneur.”

It described my milestones and presented me, and I said, “You have portrayed me…” It even drew a timeline: look at this person. He was an engineer in 2003 and 2004. He started his business in 2007. In 2010, he was CEO of a substantial company. Then he started a business, became CEO in a certain year, then CEO of another large company. Now he has a media project. You tell it, “You have presented me as someone who was a programmer, worked for a company, started a business, tried to launch a startup, and now has a blog.” Imagine reducing everyone in the world who has had a path to that same average. Most people, apart from the sons of sultans, have had some starting point, unless they have been a minister since childhood. These days, children become ministers at fourteen, sixteen, sometimes twenty. People have had some path. They worked at something: shuffled papers, mowed lawns, worked in sales, or became a programmer.

There was a path. So everyone who has ever started a business and a blog becomes the same. It makes no difference whether it is Elon Musk or Ivan Ivanov from some village with ten people following his Instagram blog. What difference does the number make: ten or ten thousand? After moving to America, I noticed something interesting about blogs. America is not just an American market of three hundred million people; it is the English-speaking market of the whole world. When you live in Belarus, you think, “My market is Belarus.” In Russia, “My market is Russia and Russian people more generally.” But in America, your market is, in a sense, the whole world. I began noticing well-known bloggers with a million followers. You open the profile of a famous person with two million followers and think, “Why so few? Why does the governor of California have two million Instagram followers? Surely he should have thirty million. He is the governor of California, Gavin Newsom. Everyone knows him.” Everyone knows him.

His power and influence in the world exceed those of ninety-five percent of the world's presidents. He governs the fifth- or sixth-largest economy in the world: California. Few people realize that this economy and Gavin Newsom's power are, in effect, greater than the power of Russia's president. Someone will say, “But he has no access to nuclear weapons.” And that is where they stop considering power or influence. His power is concentrated, by the way. He does not have eighty governors—

He does not have eighty governors spread across an enormous territory. His territory is compact and clearly defined, and his power is very clear. Two million Instagram followers. That is all. But looking at those two million people, I realized it is not about the number of followers. When a system describes you, it describes everyone in the same way, whether you are Gavin Newsom or Elon Musk. Proportionally, Musk, Newsom, and everyone else hardly have any followers, compared, for example, with Ronaldo, who has the most Instagram followers. Is Ronaldo more famous, more important, known by more people worldwide? Everyone says, “Everybody knows Elon Musk.” That is not true. Clearly more people know Michael Jackson, really know him. Or could Elon Musk fill a stadium with as many people as Madonna could for a concert? I am not belittling anyone. That is important. What matters is understanding these gradations and ways of defining people, even in AI, which on the whole is not constrained by ego.

When we describe someone, who are they really? Unfortunately, we describe people according to standards and parameters. The crucial point when we compare ourselves after taking a course and wonder whether we should become a teacher—what to tell my wife and what not to tell her—is ego. It is very clear. What state are you speaking from? You do not need to take a course to ask that. Are you speaking from love for the other person, from love for the world? Are you telling the truth? Or are you doing something to elevate yourself, feel more important, win praise from your wife or husband, or appear to be someone else? It is simple to understand, but you need to look. Have you even asked yourself these questions? Have you asked the other person questions? Do you truly see the whole system? Have you really stopped to see what state you are acting from? Take this video: why am I making it? To make things better for husbands? For wives? So viewers can take advantage of other people?

Why? Why am I making this video? What state am I acting from? To be a teacher? Or for what? Whose teacher? It all begins with this silence, which an editor will usually cut out and which no AI today will notice or be able to understand. It begins with silence, with quietly engaging and working with yourself. There is a great difference in how you speak, how you convey something, and what state you are in at that moment. To understand that, you need to recognize that an infinite spiritual world stands behind a person. In your relationships, including whether or not to share your development, that world directs things far more than you do. It sends impulses through you, the impulses the other person needs. How you handle them, whether you can hear that information without interpreting it, truly understand it and make sense of it—that is where the truth lies. Truly knowing what to do is where the truth lies. We are used to punishing people according to a written law. Yet an enormous number of people continually make mistakes that cause tremendous suffering to others, and they bear no responsibility for them. It is astonishing that a doctor can readily kill another person on the operating table because they have all the required credentials.

Someone without the credentials will go to prison for it. It is astonishing, although the responsibility is the same. From the standpoint of the spiritual world, the responsibility is the same. You need to understand and hear that. There is another remarkable thing to understand here: you do not decide whether another person becomes your student. Whoever posed this question is fundamentally self-centered. It makes no difference whether AI created it, my editor did, or someone else wrote it: it comes from a fundamentally self-centered position. However much you take on the role of teacher, whatever new and interesting things you say, only the other person, their spiritual being and consciousness—at least their consciousness—can take the position of a student and receive your information. It will not happen by your will, however much you present yourself as a teacher. That is why so many children are sent to school and told, “You must listen to the teacher,” and say, “I do not really want to. I do not like it.” “You must listen to me as your father.” “I do not want to, Dad. I just do not.” “You must listen to me as your mother.” “No, not today.

I will listen to some other man, but not you.” What governs that? What energies govern it? How can you personally speak to someone from clarity and a feeling of love for them? This is a very simple exercise. Whenever you speak, ask yourself: are you saying this from love or not? Look at love. Everything will become clear. Someone says, “I have looked at it. How do I decide what comes next?” Keep looking at it. That is enough. And on the other side, how can someone listen openly to another person? Finding that balance is people's task in their interactions. It is not a matter of zeros and ones. It is an endless search for all beings on Earth, for people living and dead.