I have to some degree publicized my recent hijinks with internet dating. After spending several years of near-isolation during grad school and my post doc, I now have a new town and new friends and I am slowly gaining a completely new perspective on people. My conclusion is, people are weird.
You aren’t going to understand people by watching TV (it’s too stylized).
You aren’t going to understand people by reading books (they’re too sentimental).
You aren’t going to understand people by taking or teaching classes (they’re all on their best behavior).
You aren’t going to understand people using the DSM-IV (they’re all weirder than that).
You aren’t going to understand people based on who you knew in high school (we were all mere embryos of people, then).
Every single person is weird in ways you could never predict, and what’s even more interesting, a lot of quirks are very prevalent, but seem to be never talked about.
A few interesting things I’ve found out recently:
If men spend any time on self-care at all, then they spend WAY more time on self-care than women do. All the men I know who are slender or athletic, are that way because they spend literally hours every day exercising. I simply don’t know women who try that hard.
There are a lot of people who aren’t interested in having sex. It’s just too much trouble. Ditto for being in a committed relationship. These people tend to spread the aspects of a relationship among several different people… a roommate for domestic bliss, a f*** buddy (maybe, sometimes), a few close friends.
We’re all mild versions of idiot-savants. Every single person I’ve met is frighteningly good at at least one thing. Awesomely good. Pleasantly, wonderfully, surprisingly good.
There is a “catch” about everyone, too. Everyone has some odious aspect that you either learn to tolerate, or drop them because of.
Forget six degrees of separation between people. Try two. Well, I’m talking about my metro area, which is about 200K people, but still. It’s amazing. It took two weeks for eHarmony to return a match for me whose profile included a picture of him with one of my co-workers. I’ve had three others who work with one particular friend of mine.
Given that we’re all weird in random ways (and there’s no way to portray them on an online dating site, alas), I realize that many quirks are not worth sharing, but… any other major trends that you have noticed, that one* can’t * learn from books?
I think this is an awesome summary of humanity. I find it so nice to think of us that way that I’m going to do so from now on.
I’ve noticed that it is extremely rare to find someone who has never dealt with self-doubt. Almost everyone, no matter how confident they seem, no matter how attractive they are, no matter how rich they are, no matter how smart they are, has that awful little voice that says, “You’re not good enough. They won’t like you. You’re ugly. You’re stupid.” It just varies by degrees.
There might be someone who doesn’t have that voice, but I’d bet good money that they just don’t have it anymore. I think quite a bit of our behavior (good and bad) stems from how we deal with self-doubt.
Everyone is neurotic, I’ve realized. Although that term is really generic, I use it to mean . . . that everyone has some kind of negative baggage or behavior that is irrational. No matter how carefree or lighthearted they might seem, everyone is neurotic about some things.
Gestalt.
If ever something has cried out for an intuitive selection of small graphical representations…it could be the biggest breakthrough in user-interface design since the first Mac.
I was 15 when I realized that Everyone is Crazy, only to different degrees. That was 30 years ago.
But like you say about trying to understand people… One of the big failings we Humans have in dealing with others is our constant attempt to pidgeon hole people into categories that we have created. We observe Individual A for a while and decide that they fit Slot 342B. Then when they do something that doesn’t mesh with our preconcieved notions of what a Slot 342B person must do, be thinking or be motivated by, we either become angry with them (because they’re confusing us) and try to shove them back into the slot we’ve assigned them; or we make negative assumptions about their “true” thoughts and motivations in order to rationalize them back into that slot.
In that way, it connects to the thread on being less sensitive to the insults of others. If we understand the above, we come to understand that, very often, when people are confused and angry with us, it’s because we’re not fitting in the slots they’ve assigned to us. In other words, it really isn’t about US, it’s about THEM and how they demand to think about us. This is especially true of strangers and people who do not know us well.
I agree that many people fall into this pattern. I myself only began to grow out of it after I turned 30.
I have a younger sister who is bipolar, and this is the only way she can make sense out of other people. Needless to say, she often gets one-dimensional views of others and will suddenly decide that someone should be rejected just because of one mistake. I used to be very intolerant of it, and upbraided her often about it. However in later years I have learned that this is the best she will ever be able to do. In a way, I was guilty of putting her in a ‘slot’ after all.
I disagree with a lot of the OP, possibly because I err to much on the side of seeing the good and the positive in people, and possibly because I notice some of the same things but would choose to interpret/describe them differently. One person’s ‘weird’ is another person’s ‘delightfully offbeat / unconventional / refreshing / stimulating / individualistic’. and so on.
However, to answer the OP, something that took me a while to discover is what a staggeringly, unbelievably high percentage of people are on some sort of daily, prescriptive drug to do with psychological health, such as anti-depressants. It was only a few years ago that I came across the term ‘SSRI’ (which, if I get it right, stands for something like ‘selective seratonin re-uptake inhibitor’). A truly amazing number of people, mostly but not all women, are using some form of SSRI every single day.
This may or may not be something to feel concerned about. One could just say it’s no big deal if someone’s taking a pill that helps to ease the grief of modern day living. Fine. On other other hand, if you’ve never had anything to do with this kind of medication, and I never have, it can give rise to a feeling of, ‘I don’t really know this person… I only know what she’s like when she’s taking her daily dose of drugs’.