Ten Things I Hate About Us
A lot of my friends, even some of my closest friends tell me that I’m often overly negative or exceedingly critical. My usual retort is that “I am a critical person, and I don’t have a lot of upbeat things to say about humans or human behavior.” From my perspective, I have a lot of positivity and wonder for a lot of things.
I love animals. And food.
Games. Math. Music. The list goes on a while.
Humans though, are a very sore subject. I often feel like I’m being strapped down, with my eyes taped open to watch people commit a litany of casual atrocities in the name of a social contract. Moreover, I feel beholden to my own empathy and caring for others because I see and hear people in pain, but upon listening I find a large number of people choosing to sustain their own suffering.
And I get it. I’ve been there, and I still am in some regard. I’m also human, albeit begrudgingly.
The behaviors I see repeated and abstracted across humans that frustrate me have been identified and sorted into ten ideas. In some circles, they’re referred to as the “10 Pillars of Irrational Thought.” I don’t love this name, because irrational has some connotation of “less than” or “without reason.” Most of these behaviors have nothing to do with value, and absolutely happen with reason. I do find frequently though that these behaviors are commonly excused as “human nature,” and are therefore deemed inevitable and insurmountable. Personally, the misstep in that line of thought is that humans are immutable creatures, fully incapable of changing. I know that’s not true, at least of myself, and therefore have reason to believe it’s not true of others.
So without further ado, presented in no specific order — ten things I hate about humans.
- In reacting to stimuli, we reflexively feel against the world and process the thoughts and feelings into emotions and then moods. A common misstep is then to put out our interpreted thoughts (emotions) into the world as if they are the ubiquitous reality, rather than a personal one. This behavior is referred to as emotional projection, and as a culture, we’ve begun to discuss this particular misgiving much more frequently, along the lines of “feelings are not facts.” It’s exactly this conflation, that my feelings are facts adherent to all parties, that adds and amplifies heat in our interactions with others. I believe this is partly a biological need to feel a sense of belonging and understanding (in line with Maslow’s hierarchy), but beyond that it’s also a side effect of necessarily sloppy communication. Because we are not perfect empaths, and language does not translate our experience completely, we end up overstepping reality with our words, often accidentally.
- We have a tendency toward polarized behaviors. It’s comfortable for us to think under the constraint of two extremes, without giving mind to the space between. This is referred to as binarization or black-and-white thinking. A lot of it is very old thinking that IS starting to unravel, like the concepts of gender, sexuality, and race. However, despite having whole fields of study to ponder the concept of “right and wrong,” at large we’re still very eager to have a clear answer for moral quandaries both great and small. The harm in binarization is that it reduces the complexity of the human experience for the pretense of certainty, all the while only ever hoping that our certainty is an actual guarantee. The advantage, and perhaps reasoning behind it lies in the extreme convenience of this heuristic approach.
- Similar to binarization, humans seem to want things to fit nicely into boxes. It’s probably how we store and retrieve memories that allows us to learn new information, which seems to be a heuristic approach. When we encounter something new, we relate all the observable pieces to our established mental schemas and construct an idea about how to interact with the new something. The step we (subconsciously or willingly) skip is often that the new thing is genuinely new and can act accordingly — in other words, we might be wrong about the new thing based on our previous experience. Perhaps most concretely, we see this in racism, misogyny, homophobia, or any other way xenophobia manifests. It’s referred to here as overgeneralizing, and it’s most likely a very old defense mechanism from when early humans still survived using an “us vs. them” strategy.
- Related to binary thinking, a core piece of human behavior these days is the assignment of “right and wrong” to anything and everything. We further conflate these labels with the ambiguous “positive and negative,” allowing us a greater range of experiences that fit nicely into a “clean binary.” While this is not great, it’s not extremely harmful until we begin to grow comfortable in one of these extremes. We begin to apply positive and negative filters to our experience, ignoring counter stimuli in the process. I think this happens as a result of sustained micro-aggressions or acute trauma/windfall as a way to mollify harsh transitions in the world. Thermodynamically, abrupt changes are rough on our body and mind, so if we instead filter out any stimulus that might jar us, we can maintain a smoother, less interrupted life.
- Similar to emotional projection, as a species we are more than a little sloppy with our words. We are often quick to call people stupid or smart, bad or good. Usually, we do so in reference to their actions, and in our haste we unwittingly assign the adjective to the person rather than the action. This is called labeling and it’s one of the more insidious mechanisms at play. It’s important to note that it cuts every way, in that labeling is not just for others — it’s also a blade we point inward quite often. It’s quite easy to backtrack and say “I didn’t mean that the person is stupid, or that I am useless.” Unlike emotional projection, and in fact many of the other pillars, I believe that this is almost entirely a social behavior. i don’t believe it has any strong benefit outside of extreme cases. The majority of people you meet will not be wholly good, bad, mean, smart, or any one thing; they will mostly be amalgams of actions you interpret in the moment. I think the shortcut we take here is just one we learn as we learn language in childhood.
- Anxiety affects the wide majority of us to varied extent. It seems common behavior to consider a progression of events that starts with something small and scales up rather quickly. In debate, this (ir)rationale is called a slippery slope and in the mental health community, it’s referred to as catastrophizing. I think this starts from a somewhat reasonable place, a defense against worst case scenarios. That’s even a healthy practice in some careers, in which it’s specifically important to consider the worst that can happen to ensure that it does not. On a personal level though, catastrophizing often involves a lot of mind-reading and fortune-telling, conflating details and scale while feeding into our anxiety. In doing so, catastrophizing often prevents us from taking action, out of fear of the grandest reproach.
- Humans tend to have a strong sense of self — not in that they necessarily know themselves well, but rather they are often fixed in their own perspective. That alone seems very reasonable, but it can extend quickly and dangerously when we begin to assume that the actions of others and of the universe happen to us alone or on account of us. Thinking like this is called personalization, and isn’t necessarily a sign of narcissism. It starts from a healthy place, since we can only truly know the world through our own eyes. The misstep occurs when to confound our size with our potential impact. There’s a seed of defense in this strategy — at a very base level, humans NEED to act selfishly for survival. But we often engage in personalization as a defense against feeling helpless. It feels better to blame ourselves than to admit we have no control over the situation.
- Since perhaps before we have begun recording our history, humans have sought to prescribe their future. On a grand scale, we tell stories of our life in the stars, and of our children’s children reaching farther than we can imagine. On a personal level, we have a tendency to prophecy our interactions with others. To our credit, we often do so with some precedent from previous interactions with a specific individual or similar individuals. This line of thinking, referred to here as fortune-telling seems to be a proactive defense mechanism. It seems like it’s meant to soothe anxious tendencies, but falls prey to a few key misunderstandings. In doing so, it can often exacerbate anxiety despite seemingly trying to counter it.
- In line with our other misgivings about ourselves, others, and the universe, the various “should’s” that we put out seem to coalesce in some sort of fantasy world in which we are the hero and our lives unfurl as, well, a children’s story might. This particular thought process sounds like “if this had happened, and they had done that, then none of this would be a problem.” It’s a pretense that life is a choose-your-own adventure book, and you simply turned to the wrong page. Fascinatingly, this idea hinges on a subconscious understanding of the fifth dimension, and we more frequently have been referring to our world as “the darkest timeline.” I believe the instinctual heart of this misgiving is a defense against “I did not do enough.” It’s a way to pass the blame, abstractly to the universe as a whole, and consider if only briefly that we might have achieved some scrap of nirvana had we only been better. This thinking is referred to as a comparison to the ideal, and it’s definitely the one I struggle with most.
- Often in interacting with other humans, or in anticipation of conflict, we make assumptions about others’ behavior. We might insist that our friends hate us for not coming to their party, or that our parents will love us more for getting a raise. However, we do this without explicit communication with the other party, hence the name mind reading. I imagine this behavior arises purely from the social component of our species. It’s a form of shame based on expectations of the individual to adhere to specific decorum that allows the group to prosper, or even just proliferate. It feels undeniable that mind reading is entrenched in projection as well, and thus would seem to be related to our sense of control.
That’s already a lot of information, and there’s some chance that as you read any of these you get a little lost as your brain constructs or remembers scenarios that fit these ideas. I think that’s healthy, and I don’t think of any of these as irrational. I do see some common threads between these ideas that I consider interesting and hope to discuss further in this context; things like:
- A fear of the unknown
- A loss of agency or control
- A need for validation, primarily external
- An active, subconscious denial of reality as it pertains to the above
Again, I can see some instinctual components to these commonalities. Fear, especially of the unknown as it pertains to mortality is a very biological process. In that sense, a lot of this behavior is explainable as “human nature,” or even just “animal nature.”
That said, humans have been defying and iterating on their nature for millennia now. I believe that by acknowledging these erroneous or incomplete processes, we can begin to counter them more actively and grow beyond them.
I believe in us, maybe to my detriment.
Sincerely Not Pessimistic,
August
