Weird Things I've Learned About People
Man: the instinct-addled goofball
People are weird. I’ve learned lots of weird things about humans. Not just as individuals with secrets and weird desires and weird goals (which I have), but collectively. As a species, as a specimen. As a case study in cause and effect.
We do weird things. We believe weird things. Our behaviors have weird causes. For instance Freud gave us some off-putting (but interesting and sometimes true) ideas about how sexuality and wounded psyches interact with one another. Or sometimes if you look at people’s finances, you can tell a lot about their deepest psychological weaknesses. People’s fears and addictions show up in their checkbooks.
Or if you look at the ways men and women interact with each other, and you don’t understand evolutionary instincts, you can walk away from social situations thinking, “what the hell is wrong with people?”
One of my deepest interests in life is getting to the bottom of people. Sometimes that’s really hard. Here are some weird things about people that have made me think.
A lot of positive interaction between people can be thought of as flirting.
I heard this somewhere a few months ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve never really been a social person by nature (I have to try, as it were), and I’ve never been able to do all the effortless interaction that the outgoers seem to do. I’ve never been able to interact with other men in the hazing, bullshitting way that men do. I guess I’ve just never understood it.
But this clarified things a bit, even if it’s not literally true. It taught me how to conceptualize a lot of interaction between people who like each other.
When you see two men at a bar, friends or buddies, teasing each other, swearing at each other, each telling the other how incompetent and silly and pathetic he is, what are they really doing? They’re trying to one-up each other. They’re picking at each other’s weaknesses and making fun of each other’s excesses, the way two lovers might do when they’re trying to get each other riled up. This is how men and women often act when they’re infatuated with each other.
Which leads me to the not-surprising-at-all observation that a lot of great sex is made of this very same behavior. Just screwing with each other. Continuing to come up with the next clever thing to say, and the next clever thing and the next one, to keep the relationship lively and energized. To show each other that you’re competent enough to keep the engine running, and invested enough to keep putting in the effort to do so.
And that is, after all, what leads many couples to the bedroom. Right? A display of competence and a display of effort. To make yourselves sexy to the other by displaying that you’re A) worthy of attention because you’re somebody, and B) invested enough in “me” to want to impress me. Couples who can display these two things to each other over and over end up in the bedroom frequently.
That’s what a lot of friendships are made of. And it’s why men speak to each other the way they do. It’s affection. Even when they’re being vulgar and borderline cruel, it’s about showing “I’m somebody and so are you.” It’s a sign of respect; it says “I think you’re worth investing time and cleverness into. And I feel safe enough with you to do so.” Sparring matches are a way that people maintain trust and competence.
Friends who can constantly push each other to react smartly, think quickly, and display competence are probably going to remain both good friends and stronger people.
And besides that, when you’re around people you really enjoy, whether they’re men or women, you like to see the best parts of them. And there’s nothing wrong with deliberately trying to get those parts to come out. It’s fun. It’s how you have fun with people you’re close to.
And, cruelly for high-school outcasts and loner employees in the working world, these things are feedback loops. If you’re not the kind of person who “flirts” with other people, you’ll get less and less attention. Because people want to flirt with somebody who’s somebody, the same way they want to sleep with somebody who’s somebody. And if you’re the kind of young man who keeps to himself, unfortunately, other men aren’t going to waste their time. Because, by all visible measures, you’re nobody.
Which is why one of the most important skills you can give a young man is to teach him how to spar. Because that skill set will carry into every relationship he will ever have.
Men are mean when they’re affectionate. Women are nice when they hate you.
Men will be cruel to each other face to face and then kind behind each other’s backs.
Women will be soaking wet with fake kindness to each other’s faces, and rip each other apart behind closed doors.
Neither of these approaches is wrong (although the male one makes way more sense and is better and confuses me way less). They just highlight some of the funny differences between the sexes.
I think the difference is in how men and women form local bonds. Men test each other out in the open. Men are about stats and figures and data. They want to see, right out here in the open, whether you can be counted on and whether (as we said above) you are somebody. They implement a test for you, and you either pass it or fail it.
Women, living in a world of subtlety as they do, keep each other accountable by displaying the fragility of relationships to each other. When women sit around gossiping about their friends, the message it sends to everyone involved is if you’re doing something anti-social or gross or improper, you can bet your ass we’re sitting around talking about it when you’re not around. Maybe the understood message, then, is that if your behavior becomes anti-social enough and uncooperative enough, you’ll simply be dismissed from the ladies’ table. You’ll be cut off socially.
Men control each other through outright testing. Women control each other by leveraging the power of community.
And the evolutionary ramifications then, if the other local women cut you off, would be that your children would grow up outcasts and you’d be without community support in raising them. That’s a pretty strong incentive to be pro-social. It still doesn’t make the behavior feel any less socially weird, though.
People are terribly dishonest with themselves about what they can expect out of relationships.
One might think that “social” media would have made marriage a widespread, fruitful, and ubiquitous endeavor. If you’d have told someone living in 1910 that a hundred years hence we’d have a universal connection to all the singles in the world, they might say “wow, so everyone will find the perfect person. How amazing.”
But we have had no such luck.
Even if you believe in “the perfect person” existing, you do have to admit one truth: there isn’t a perfect person for everyone. Simply by the laws of math (there’s no way that for each possible configuration of human strengths, weaknesses, neuroses, and tastes, there is exactly one equal and opposite configuration somewhere in exactly one other human being).
But further, you have to admit the harsh reality that most people are probably not worth an amazing partner. Because the average person is pretty regular.
That’s the weird part. That’s what the sexual revolution, social media, and the hyper-self-centered individualism of the modern West have done to us. Everyone wants the perfect marriage that perfectly satisfies their tastes — and yet few people want to put in the work to be that for someone else. Everybody wants outstanding, but nobody wants to be outstanding.
200 years ago, you married someone local out of maybe 5 options. You picked the man or woman you most fancied, and you built a life with them because they were your best bet. People were decisive because they were constrained. Now that humans have access to all other humans, we somehow think that if we just keep looking, we’ll find someone just a little more perfect than the last one. If we just keep looking.
That’s not what marriage is. The biggest injury that social media and dating apps have caused us is a fundamental, ground-level error in thinking.
You pick someone who likes you, because there probably aren’t that many, and you try your ass off to be a great spouse to them. That’s what marriage is. Great relationships are built, not found.
It’s funny… people will dismiss God because they can’t see or feel him, but they still live in a world where “I can have the perfect marriage” because “I’m a wonderful person.” People still believe in fairy tales… but only the worst ones. People believe in magic, but only dumb kinds. Kinds that make them feel good about themselves.
People display the most conviction about things they understand the least.
I posted a note (like a tweet) in the Substack app about how I’m reading the entire Bible this year. I received a huge amount of replies — way more than I normally would, on any other kind of post — from people with their own suggestions, beliefs, and admonitions. “Here's the translation you must read,” they’d say. Or “this version is closest to the truth, use this one.” Or “Lol have fun wasting your time.”
Each comment with as much certainty as the one above it.
My point isn’t that religion is bad or silly. In my eyes, religion is a moral skeleton without which the human being and human culture become lost and shapeless.
My point is that you could stand in a room with one hundred different people from all over the world, and each of you could have fantastically different religious beliefs... and each of you would be as certain of yourself as the two people next to you. People’s religious beliefs are similar to people’s political beliefs: they believe what feels best to them. And they believe it with incomplete information, for social and cultural reasons, and because of the happenstance of where they were born.
I once dated a woman who, by demeanor and values, was about as liberal as you can possibly get. But she was instead a die-hard conspiracy-theory conservative. Why? Because her entire family was. It was socially convenient for her to be a die-hard conservative. She had fooled herself into beliefs that didn’t even align with the values that I could see with my own eyes.
People born in remote villages in India never even got the chance to hear of Christ. To claim that they have the wrong god is… ridiculous. That’s like saying a person born in a sealed cave should have just tried a little harder to get some sunlight. They didn’t know it existed. Their experience of life is utterly separate from yours.
If you have strong religious beliefs, or strong political beliefs, it’s easy for others to say you’re stupid. (Especially if you talk about God without having read the Bible, or talk about politics having done zero research. But that’s not the point.)
What I’m saying is, each of us is stupid in our own ways. So conviction isn’t the missing (or the important) ingredient. Nor is information. The missing ingredient is: acceptance that we each believe what feels good to us. Beliefs are, unfortunately, often a matter of social convenience. And yet we treat them as infallible truths. It’s understandable, but it’s weird.
Instincts, amplified, become diseases.
Social media gave us the chance to encounter the entire world in our daily lives.
And we are social animals, which means that all of our instincts apply to our behavior online. But our instincts are to fit in socially (for the survival of our offspring). This might not sound so bad.
But if you have a stage big enough, it means you will never stop performing and you will never stop trying to earn just a little more approval from just a little more of the audience. Human beings are weird because we desperately crave social approval, and we can be tricked into behaving in incredibly anti-social ways in order to get it.
We have a mechanism inside us to seek approval from “more” of the group so that we have less of a chance of ending up alone without community resources. And yet we’ll alienate ourselves from the people right next to us to please people 5,300 miles away.
We think we want the world’s approval. Which is wrong and a horrifically destructive idea. You will never have “the world’s” approval. You can and should only seek the approval of those who live near you, and whose lives are actually intertwined with your own. People who actually share your culture and your location and your children. Having anyone else’s approval is not only fruitless and pointless, it’s actively harmful to the need to foster active, engaged relationships close to home.
After all, the internet can’t help you raise your kids. And raising kids is why we have social instincts in the first place. The more online we go, the more our own instinct to be social is ruining our lives. Performing for the world is a trick that technology has played on us to turn our biggest strength into our biggest liability.
If you give a man enough rope, he’ll hang himself. For no reason other than because that's all he can think of to do with rope.
Our instincts are the same way. If you don’t know what to do with them, they’ll eat you alive. Especially when the world of technology is designed to weaponize them against you.
So judge people a little less, and your own instincts a little more.
Drink some water and don’t be weird.
JR
“Going to a junkyard is a sobering experience. There you can see the ultimate destination of almost everything we desired.” - Roger von Oech