Getting To Know You

You could say that the business of people is getting to know other people. Oh sure, there are a few of us that are so introverted, so disdainful of people in general, that they find a life of isolation much more to their liking, much as Thoreau must have felt when he headed off to Walden.

But for the rest of us, we live in a social world where we try to understand others, and perhaps get them to like us. It's easier to notice behavior in others. That person's an ass. That person's quiet. She's sassy. He's funny. She's nerdy. He's brooding. Even these adjectives serve only as signposts that reduce the totality of a person to a word or two.

It's clearly not fair that we label people this way, and yet it happens all the time, because humans don't deal with complexity well. Stereotyping is part of that. It is a laziness that tries to pin labels on a group so we don't have to think too hard.

We've all met people that are easy to like. They seem to make friends easily. They smile. They joke. They always seem to have something interesting to say. We gravitate to such people because they generally make us feel good about ourselves, to make us feel a greater self worth.

I've always found it fascinating to try to figure out why people are the way they are, but as I've grown older, I realize that I'm not particularly scientific about it. I'm not, say, Kinsey, who studied gall wasps with fastidious detail, collecting hundreds of thousands of specimens, and then used this technique on people. His studies were meant to be scientific, to get at a cross-section of American males and females.

I'm sure my fascination extends mostly to people that are interesting to me, rather than everyone in general, and therefore lacks the dispassion one needs to really understand people.

At the root of this is trying to explain how others behave, as one is in an emotional state. I've been told that this is unwise. An emotional person trying to be rational often leads to a false sense of the world. And yet, that's my inclination, and perhaps explains why I'm drawn to science and engineering: the need to explain why the world works.

I posit this idea: the goal of people is to be liked by other people. I think, for the most part, it's true, even if many of us aren't very good at it. I know people who whine about such things, wondering why a person they like won't do things with them. Whining is something easy we can all do. It's wondering why the world isn't the way we want it to be, rather than figuring out how to make it the way we want it.

Sadly, it's much easier to get people to dislike you than like you, and even when they like you (or dislike), there's a matter of degree. A person may be polite to you, but otherwise keep a professional distance. They may like you, but not exactly invite you to hang out with them. They may want to hang out with you. They may want to date you. Whatever.

The point is that liking and disliking occurs on a huge spectrum.

But, the point I wanted to make was knowing someone. That's more challenging, because people are often more complex than you give them credit for. Again, like anything in life, you need to pick and choose who you want to know better, and then it depends partly on their personality, partly on yours, to figure out something about someone.

This is one reason I find blogs fascinating. I know that blogs can convey very little information. Some blogs are business-like in nature. They point out outrages in society, or the latest technological gizmo, or link to nifty websites. They say something about the author, but not a lot.

Some bloggers are much more introspective. I know a person who used to talk about his girlfriend, and the difficulties they'd go through. This was a blog, you realize. Obviously, near strangers such as myself could read it, but more than that, his girlfriend (now ex) could also read it. And yet it was fascinating because he wanted to bare it all, to tell the world why he thought the relationship was or was not working. Most people would find such honesty as washing one's laundry in public. It would be seen as particularly unfair to the girl to expose this kind of emotional detail on the world.

And yet, it's these kinds of blogs that fascinate me most because they are the ones that offer insight into a person, which is what I find I like about blogs.

You find that it's necessary to have a kind of internal censor when blogging. You read about a person who went on vacation with his wife and the places they see, but then details about the fight they might have had, or that she seemed inattentive or too attentive, or the hot lady at the restaurant that he may have fantasized about briefly, or any number of embarassing details that often the author can't even remember when they start blogging are missing, mostly because they don't think it's important, but in the end, if pressed, mostly because they don't think it's your business.

I recently read an article in the Post about high schools that are warning students not to blog too personally about themselves. Teens, who are almost by definition, novices when it comes to dealing with people, are often startlingly honest, their problems, which often seem so petty and inconsequential with the hindsight of age, are often monumental as they are living it. And they're willing to blog about it, spewing emotion and possibly rancor to anyone who's willing to read it.

Yet, despite their very public nature, blogs are treated by teens as somewhat personal, aimed at a select audience which often don't include their parents. These kids are often shocked, shocked!, that there parents read their blogs. And yet, parents are reading them for the very same reason people read blogs at all. To gain insight.

A person can come across far more interesting in words than they do in person. With the privacy of the computer, and the time to compose, a good wordsmith can scribe far more passionately than they could elocute.

I remember seeing an interview with Frank Miller, the artist who drew Sin City. He seemed far too nerdy of a guy to have drawn such violence, and it made me think that he was a person who could at least draw the kind of world he might want to live in, if he had that kind of personality to survive in it.

Still, were I to meet this Miller, I might not know that graphic novels represent a side of his personality, and were I to simply read his graphic novels, I'd certainly gain little insight into Miller, except in the narrowest of ways.

Reading a blog has that same problem. People mentioned in the blog are people you don't know. Is the author sufficiently aware of his audience that he or she is willing to fill details in about who Peter is, who Mary Jane is, who Aunt May is, so that you can begin to form your own opinions, albeit through the eyes of the blogger?

Or are their names dropped in without concern of whether you know or don't know the person.

I've also met people via the Internet, and that's when I really don't know much about that person. Still, I know people who say it's the opposite. For some reason, being able to talk to a stranger can be strangely liberating, as you reveal bits and pieces of who you are that you can't reveal to your real-life friends because the consequences of doing so are too problematic.

And I haven't even pointed out that there are people, who's interests and backgrounds are so far removed from mine, that I could hardly begin to understand them. For example, imagine hanging out with a boxing trainer, or a homeless person, or a musician, or an aborigine from Australia, or a Buddhist monk, or a rabbi.

There are people you'd simply scratch your head trying to say, what on earth do I possibly have in common with these people? And again, to that extent, I admit I have no interet in finding out who they are.

Culture has a lot to do with that. I like to buy gifts for friends, but generally, those friends, while appreciative, feel awkward with accepting gifts. In general, they're not going to say "That's the greatest thing ever, thanks!". Giving gifts can be awkward, as it turns out. However, my mother, growing up in another culture, feels that giving too much leaves you open to those who would take advantage of it, that they would perhaps pester you for more money, more gifts, because they know you're a sucker.

Yet, that thought would never cross my mind. I don't think I'd even want to hang out with anyone like that. And the people I know don't behave like that, yet, clearly my mother grew up in a culture where such behavior was, if not commonplace, at least not unheard of.

Her model about the way the world works clearly doesn't match mine, which isn't to say that either of us are wrong, but that maybe the model only applies to the culture we're in.

This is why I have to laugh when people make pronouncements about the world, particularly conservatives. Conservatism, almost by its very definition, is about the status quo, about liking the way the world is. If you grew up in small, conservative, Western America, then that's the world you see and like to see, and to be told that there's a whole world out there that views things differently, is to dig at the root of what people want, which is comfort.

People are scared of what's different, and are comforted by the familiar, except the few of us who constantly seek the different.

Anyway, this entry is going totally nowhere. It conveys some of what I want to say, but as usual, in this mishmash of a stream of consciousness style that I tend to embrace out of mental laziness.