Category: human nature

The Quiet Quirky Clues to Our Core

RilalyLeave a comment

A baby, in the arms of her father, watched a line of adults proceed by her in church. She watched them proceed past with little interest. She watched them as I watched her, both of us looking at nothing until something caught our eye. Something caught her eye. She went from absently looking at people to intense focus. I turned to see what caught her attention. It was another daughter being held by her father in a different manner. The watcher and the watchee locked eyes for a couple seconds, and the moment passed, or so I thought. The watcher then wriggled herself into another position. “What are you doing?” her father whispered, looking down at her movements and adjusting his arms according to her wishes. When she was done finagling her fathers’ arms to her wishes, she ended up in the exact same position as the watchee in her father’s arms. I found her exposé into the human condition fascinating, because it suggested that keeping up with the jonses is just plain human nature, as opposed to learned behavior.

What does it mean? Does her mimicry reveal our innate need to achieve conformity, or the thought that we, even when very young, believe everyone else is doing it better?

***

Ever shake hands with a young kid, say seven-to-nine-years-old? They put their hand out vertical, but they add no grip, and their completion of the ritual is almost robotic. Adults apply meaning to this superficial, symbolic ritual. Kids just do what they’re told, the way we did when we were kids. They don’t know any better, we do. Yet, if we know better, what do we know? We think we gain special insight into a man by the way he shakes another man’s hand, but what do we gain? How hard is it to fake a great handshake?

“I never respected a man who didn’t shake a man’s hand,” my father-in-law said. “If a fella gives you a firm, but-not-too-firm handshake, and he looks you in the eye while he’s doing it, you know he’s a man’s man, and a man you can trust” 

“Fair enough,” I said, “but can it be faked?” It was a leading question, but I was also so curious about this staple of the insightful man’s definition of a man he thought he could trust on sight. 

“You can feel it,” he said.

That seemed preposterous to me, but he had a closing tone that suggested further interrogation on my part would be viewed as disrespectful. It was not my intention to be disrespectful, as I knew this man knew ten times more about reading people than I’ll ever know. He spent a forty-year career learning the difference between honest people and deceitful ones, and he was, by all accounts, very good at his job. 

I didn’t think my other questions were disrespectful, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that they were leading questions that asked him if he knew how wrong he was. So, I just shut it.

If I continued down this path, I would’ve told him about the weasel I met who knew how to shake a man’s hand, and he was so good at it that I thought, ‘Now that’s a handshake.’ I never put much stock in handshake readings, but this man had such a great handshake that it influenced my first impression. The weasel then spent the next twenty minutes trying to find creative ways to get me to part with my money. Piece of junk is what he was, but he had a nice, firm handshake, and he looked me in the eyes while he did it. I’ll give him that.

What does it mean? We think it’s a little cute that a young one doesn’t understand the complexities involved in the hand shake, and we dismiss the child’s failure to provide any data to our information-gathering exercise. As we age, we learn that a proper handshake conveys trust and respect, but some of us learn how to fake this customary ritual to mislead people. Relying on the knowledge we’ve attained from the meaning behind a great handshake is flawed. I’d much rather talk to them, watch them, and read them to learn the refrain in their brain.

***

“I wish I had all the money and love that guy had,” a young feller said referring to an NBA player who happened to be the son of a former NBA player. To paraphrase the Tina Turner song, What’s [Money] Got to do With It? Money can buy us all sorts of things, but there comes a point when the power of money ends.

At some point, money becomes an afterthought. Once we have enough money to support us for the rest of our lives, it’s “one less thing to worry about,” as the Forrest Gump character said. Name recognition is another powerful tool, as it can open doors for us, but once we’re in, we’re in. What do we do then? If we don’t have game, at some point, no one cares what our name is. Money can’t buy respect from our peers in school, at the workplace, or on the court. That’s where names are made and lost. When we fail, money won’t help people forget. Love and an excellent support system are the coin of the realm there. When I failed in school, the workplace, and in athletics, I would’ve loved it if someone said, “You’re going to fail, it’s what we do, it’s what we do the moment after we fail that defines us.” I would’ve also loved it if they added, “And when you fail, just know that you have me, the person who cares more about what happens to you than anyone else in the world, standing right behind you.”

What does it mean? We all know those cynical types who think that in one way or another, money solves everything. My guess is this is said most often by cynical types who never had any, because it is an excellent excuse to explain to ourselves why they haven’t measured up. We could list all of the players in our culture who never had a dime growing up, but that would be redundant. We all know that money does not help us deal with momentary failures, but we have to admit that if we didn’t have what we believed to be a quality excuse those temporary failures could crush us. If quality excuses help us get over speed bumps, what do we do then? Most of the successful people, I’ve met tell me stories of their no-money, no friends in high places rise, and I’ve heard a number of tales that detail trials and errors, and rock bottom, insomnia-rich, where-do-I-go-from-here failures that eventually lead to success. “How?” will be your first question, and your second question will be an unspoken, “What’s the difference between you and me?” Where did their inner drive come from? Their answers will usually be a frustrating amount of nothing really, except that they had an unwavering spirit behind them, often a parent, who provided support, guidance, love, and a whole bunch of other elements that taught them that momentary failure is nothing more than a learning experience.

***

I hear parents rewrite their past all the time at their kid’s baseball games. Mythologizing ourselves into an ideal image is just kind of what we do when we’re watching our kids play ball. This “They’re not as good as we were,” mentality helps us control the narrative of our lives by highlighting our character-defining moments to attempt to rewrite our character. Yet, when we’re telling our kids about the seminal, pivotal memories of our lives, how often do we “misremember” key details that never made it into our highlight reels? When we see our kids act in a somewhat less than aggressive manner, we’re despondent. “That’s not how I did it!” we say. Is that true? It is, because it’s how we remember it. It’s possible that we remember it correctly, but it’s more probable that we remember our highlight reels as opposed to our reality. It’s also possible that we’ve rewritten our past so thoroughly that that is genuinely how we remember it. I do this, you do it, we all do it. Our grandparents probably did it to our parents, our parents do it to us, and we do it to our kids. It’s so common that we could probably call this chain of rewrites human nature at this point. 

What does it mean? Our rewrites are an attempt to correct the past that we think might help us correct our present and future. They’re not lies, however, as we genuinely believe them after reviewing our highlight reels. Yet, the best rewrite we could possibly write is the one in which we try to escape the clutches of this chain. It could alter our kids future if we rewrote the mistakes our parents made with us. We may not want to recount our failures for them, but we could talk about how we dealt with adversity, moments of embarrassment, and humiliation. We could offer them a love and support rewrite that includes our own version of the “And when you fail…” note of support listed earlier that we wish our parents offered us?    

***

Alan “the neighbor” offered Ben “the neighborhood teenager” some advice on his game. The Ben, in our scenario, forgot everything Alan said two seconds after he’s said it, which made Ben the perfect repository for Alan’s otherworldliness worldliness. I wanted to tell Alan to “Save it” about halfway through his spiel, because other, more prominent types in Ben’s life offered him similar advice, and he didn’t listen to them either. Ben was all about achieving independence, or at least a level that made him immune to responding to advice. I didn’t say anything, because I knew this really wasn’t about Alan helping Ben improve his game. Allen just wanted to display his unique understanding of the human condition to us.

What does it mean? We all offer one another advice, and we all politely avoid listening to those who are kind enough to offer us some advice. Not only do I know people who act this way, I know I am one of them. There are a variety of reasons and excuses for why we don’t listen to anyone, but my advice to people who give advice is, “Save it! No one’s listening.” That’s dumb advice I know, because when we spot a flaw in someone’s game, or in someone’s life, some of us sincerely want to help them, and we can’t avoid trying to prove the knowledge we’ve attained along the way. The problem with us hearing such advice is that most of us believe doing the same thing over and over will eventually produce different results.  

***

We all try to help one another when we spot flaws, but you ever tried to get a senior citizen’s mind right on a passion project of yours? When I watch it happen a big, neon-flashing “SAVE IT!” crosses my mind. You have an opinion, we have an opinion, and the only thing that keeps some of us going is the belief that their opinion is uninformed, because it goes against our sources. Before we go about getting their mind right however, we might want to consider the demographic of our audience. Marketers have what they call a key demo, and they pay big bucks for ad space in a show that appeals to audiences between the ages of 18-49, because their intense market research suggests that they’re still susceptible to suggestion.

When we’re under 18, we’re even more susceptible to suggestion, but we don’t have any money. The 49+ demo have all the money, but advertisers don’t waste the corporation’s time or money trying to persuade them, because through market research they’ve learned that the 49+ mind is already made up. I’ve met the anecdotals, my aunt was an anecdotal. She thought adhering to the prevailing winds of change gave her a more open-minded presentation, and she hoped it made her appear fresh, hip, and younger. It didn’t, but she got a lot of mileage out of being anecdotal. Generally speaking, the +49ers stubbornly adhere to the patterns they’ve developed, and all the routines and rituals they’ve had for a majority of their lives.

What does it mean? Market research dictates that most of the 49+ demo is so loyal to the products they’ve consumed for years that they’re branded. So, go ahead and tell them your opinions, because that’s your right, but just know that you’re probably wasting your breath if you think you’re going to get their minds right on your pet topic, because they’ve aged out of anyone ever changing their mind on anything. If you disagree, go ahead and ask someone who spends millions trying to tap into the culture and reach the widest audience possible. The marketing agencies, and various marketing departments of corporations have decided that pouring millions into advertising to +49ers is equivalent to pouring money down the drain.

Once you’ve arrived at your conclusion, you might want to join me in my quest to get marketing teams to stop directing a portion of their advertising budgets to streaming services. If that fails, we should focus on getting them to offer a +49 opt out on button on commercials for those who’ve aged out of the key demo, because their beloved fast-forward thumbs are developing callouses.

I Hate Working Out!

RilalyLeave a comment

“I hate working out!” Jack LaLanne once said in an interview I heard him give before he passed.

I remember when I was young, and I didn’t have to workout. I could look good, feel good, and my body was a well-honed machine without it. I call those days the glory days. I didn’t workout as often as I should’ve, because it was boring. It was also painful. If you do it right, you should experience a little pain. “Who told you that?” workout fanatic John Johnson asked. “That might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It sounds dumb on the surface,” I said, “but if you finish working out without some pain, what some call a small, satisfying amount of pain, you know that you didn’t do it right that day.” John Johnson refused to concede the point, but when he finished he gave one of those thousand yard stares that told me he was thinking about what I said.  

There were times when I went through runs. I’d work my way into a 2-3 times a week workout week, but it wasn’t biologically required. Now that I’m old, I work out as much as I didn’t when I was young, and I hate every minute of it. 

I know, I know, you love it, but that’s probably because you’re not doing it right now. You love the effects of it, and I feel you, because I know how great it makes me feel, how energetic I feel, and how great peak, physical health feels, but while you’re doing it? C’mon! We do it, because we know we have to do it, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. 

I hate it, you hate it, we all hate exercising, and now we find out that Jack LaLanne, the guy who gained fame for reportedly working out two hours a day, every day of his life, hated it. “Every minute of it,” he said. LaLanne went on to talk about why he did it anyway, and all of the benefits of doing it anyway, but the soundbite remains. He didn’t go into details on why he hated working out, but we can all guess that it had something to do with the fact that it’s painful, and painfully repetitive and boring.

A good book, a podcast, or an energetic heavy metal album can make working out less tedious, but physical fitness experts tell us that doing that is a mistake. “If you want the optimum results from a workout,” they say. “You need to mentally and physically maintain a focus on the muscles, or the muscle groups, that you’re working on. If you seek optimum results, you’ll workout without distraction.” My guess is that they’re talking about weight training exclusively, because what difference does it make if we’re distracted on a treadmill?  

I also consider working out relatively unrewarding. I see the benefits in my mood, my energy levels, and on my health, but I’m in a good mood today, and I’m in good health, as I write this. Good health is the norm, we don’t appreciate it, and we take it for granted. While we’re experiencing our relative definition of peak physical conditioning, it can prove difficult to keep it going. After a while, we realize there is no higher peak, there’s only sustaining the peak, and that can be relatively unrewarding. Even though it’s completely logical to want this to last longer, we begin to consider this feeling the new norm, and we don’t have the urgency to keep it going. I think we all experience this to varying degrees, but I didn’t comprehend the totality of it, until I ran into an old friend at my gym. 

“Have you ever had a bad back?” Imelda asked me at the gym. “It goes away, right? What if it didn’t? What if you experienced the worst back pain every day of your life for years? What would you do if you saw every expert, in every field you could think up, and they couldn’t help you? I am not a suicidal person, but I was in such horrible pain, for so long that I thought this was my life now. I just didn’t see how I could go on like that.” Imelda said, alluding to the fact that the idea of suicide crossed her mind. She eventually found a savior, a massage therapist who informed her that there were limits to what she could do for her. “You need to learn how to help yourself?” this message therapist told her. The message therapist put her on a workout plan at the gym. “It took a while,” Imelda informed me, “and when I say a while, I mean a while for me to endure the excruciating pain of working those muscles out to find some relief, and it took a while after that to achieve something close to normalcy.” After seeing those benefits, Imelda began working out every day, and she informed me that she hadn’t missed a day in about three years. “I live in fear that if I miss a day, I’ll be back on the floor screaming in pain, and I’m not going back. I’m never going back.”

Imelda informed me that I knew nothing about pain, real pain. I only made it to the gym when I was feeling particularly sluggish. To Imelda, it was about improving her quality of life, and she was either so grateful for the benefits, or fearful of returning to ground-bound pain that she was afraid to miss a day for years. The rest of us can’t help but take good health for granted. 

How long does a physical peak from an excellent workout last? About as long as our workout sabbatical? Peak physical condition, for most of us, usually follows some sort of health scare, or at least a moment of concern. We beat and abuse our body until it hurts, and we workout to recover. When we get back into peak, physical form, we start the cycle all over again.  

“See, to me, you go to the health club, you see all these people, and they’re working out, and they’re training, and they’re getting in shape, but the strange thing is, nobody’s really getting in shape for anything. The only reason that you’re getting in shape is so you can get through the workout.” –Jerry Seinfeld.

Those of us who hate working out on a regular basis love jokes like these, and we repeat them as often as we can. We also love articles that state, “No one really needs to undergo intense weight training four days a week. Some of the times, all we need is a low impact, low stress, long walk.” It’s true, but how true is it? Is it a convenient truth that we use to avoid stressful, rigorous workouts that can prove painful. Depending on our age, we need to stress and strain our muscles a little, maybe as little as two times a week for fifteen minutes a day. “That’s it?” That’s it, but they need to be intense workouts. They should involve some strain and some pain. 

We also don’t workout as often as we should because we’re lazy, undisciplined, and we can think of about 10,000 other things we’d rather do. I’m not on restart day. Restart day is not always on a Monday, but let’s just call it Monday. When Monday rolls around, I enter full workout mode. I listened to all of my excuses last week, and I just got tired of hearing all of that complaining. One of the first things that happens on restart day, soon after I lift that first barbell, I begin thinking about how often I will be working out this week. Even though this is the first time I’ve worked out in weeks, I immediately think that I’m actually, finally going to break my lifelong record of working out four different times in one week. I’m excited, because I’m actually working out, and I think the streak I really haven’t started yet will never end. I buy into the notion that this time it will all be different. When Tuesday rolls around though, I’m just a little too sore to work out again. It’s not a lie, but it’s not really the truth either. We don’t lie to ourselves, but we do fib. It’s more of a convenient truth. On Wednesday, I have something else to do, but that’s all right, because I still have Thursday and Friday, and I have all of that free time on Saturday and Sunday. Before I know it, I haven’t worked out in weeks again, and I have to start the dreaded restart.  

The restart is embarrassing and shameful, because we know we didn’t really do anything during those weeks when we could’ve been working out. We lost the discipline we showed that Monday, and we’re a little mad at ourselves for giving all that up. So, how do we get that discipline back? We buy it in the form of a gym membership. By buying that membership we’ll be putting our money where our mouth is. Making that financial commitment will surely up our personal level of commitment.

“I can’t tell you how many people buy gym memberships on January second, and they don’t show up again after about January twenty-second,” a friend and former gym employee once told me. “Our gym was always packed in January. We had to teach loyal customers the policies our gym has for time spent on machines and wait times, because they never had to learn them throughout the prior year. This was not much of a problem by February, as most of the crowds thinned out, and by March it was pretty much back to the same faces we saw throughout the previous year.”  

If we are one of the few honest enough to cancel the gym membership we’re no longer using, we might supplant it with an in-home machine or gym.

“Yeah, be careful what you spend on those,” he said, “because you can’t buy discipline.”

These at-home machines are a physical showcase of our discipline, and we’re not afraid to parade our friends around them, but the only exercise they offer us, after the initial push, pedal, and pull, is when we dust them off before our friends arrive. These machines and home gyms are also not only expensive, they take up a lot of space in our homes, because we’ll never resell these products for that would be an admission of failure beyond cancelling a gym membership.

The reward of a good workout is not the workout, as most of us hate every minute of it. No, we look forward to the end. We do everything we can think of, while in the midst of it, to occupy our mind and time until the end, but if we don’t start, we don’t have to long for the end. I know once I start, I won’t be able to end for hours, so why start? Well, how old are you?

If we’re not yet forty, that beautiful machine we call our body is still an incredible machine. For most of us, it’s still resourceful, adaptive, and able to recover from just about anything we put into it. Depending on our lack of activity, we may not see much diminishment until the big 44 hits. According to the scientists at Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore when an individual hits forty-four-years of age, they will experience a serious drop off in physical ability. It’s the first age, they say, when we’ll experience the first number of effects of age. At age forty-four and then sixty, we will see two huge drop-offs in physical ability, they observe.

“Aging is no longer viewed as the gradual, linear regression we’ve all believed for so long,” they conclude, “it happens in two huge drops.”

“So, if I’m not yet forty-four-years-old,” you say, “I have nothing to worry about?” You are correct, if you believe the study, but there’s that stubborn, little asterisk labeled routine. As I wrote earlier, most of us will not establish a bona fide workout routine, until we experience a health scare. If those scientists are correct, that health scare will probably occur somewhere around our 44th birthday. That’s right, the day of reckoning that so many talk about will hit, and you might want to do everything you can now to prepare for it.  

Are you going to wake on the morning of your 44th birthday with a barbell in hand? Of course not, you’re going to do what you did on your 24th and 34th birthday. You’re going to continue to do what you do. It’s what we all do. You’re best proactive measure is to develop a routine that incorporates some weight training, and I’ve read that some can mean, depending on the person, as little as two workouts a week for as little as fifteen minutes a day. You are also correct, again according to the study, that if you pick up a weight on your 44th birthday, and you develop a healthy relationship with it going forward, you might be just fine. Are you that disciplined? Can you turn it on and off, like a light switch. If you can, you’re a better man than I am.

I don’t care who you are, or what age, working out just plain sucks, and anyone who says different is either lying or so disciplined that I just cannot relate with them. Check that, if we’re talking in hypotheticals, most people talk about the glories of a rigorous workout, how they feel so alive after a great workout, and they do it so often that it’s almost a competition. “I work out four days a week, and I work out with various weights, leg, arms, chest, and back alternately. I’d rather be on an elliptical or under a barbell than anywhere else in the world. It makes me feel so alive!” Are they lying or exaggerating? Hard to tell, but if they were as alive as they claim to be, they’d probably look more alive. If they were more honest, they’d say, “I hate working out, it’s boring, but I do it for all of the health benefits, and the effects it has on my mood, but I can think of about 10,000 things I’d rather do than lay on another bench, pick up a barbell for the umpteenth time in my life, or walk on a treadmill to watch the hundredths of a mile pass by in agonizingly slow progressions.”

The Loud and the Quiet

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Are you loud or quiet? Tough question, right? You don’t think it is? You think you know? You probably think you’re in the middle somewhere, somewhere a couple clicks south of loud. Lets me ask someone else, someone who knows you well, but not too well. Someone who’s close to you but not so close that they share your perspective on you. What do you think they’d say? 

I don’t know how anyone else approaches their matters, but when it comes to finding answers to deeply personal questions, my mind goes to children’s programming. Some cite thought-provoking authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, and others use The Bible. I find myself in Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo, and of course Sesame Street. 

In one of their most famous sketches, the Sesame Street team provided a psychological think piece that explored the differences between loud and quiet people. As anyone who knows Sesame Street can guess, the Muppets displayed exaggerated characteristics for comedic effect. After introducing the families, Gordon scrambles the family members together and asks us to determine which individuals belong to which family. Everything the individuals from the loud family did was loud, of course, and everything the quiet family did was quiet. The traits they displayed were comically obvious to the viewers at home, but the individuals in the experiment were surprised when we considered our choice easy. The families knew, because they were members of the loud family and the quiet family, but the individual members of the family probably didn’t think they were as loud or quiet as the rest of their family. Message received: we think we know how we are perceived, but we’re often wrong. 

I was just as shocked as those Muppets to learn that those who knew me well considered it just as obvious that I belonged to a quiet family. I never thought of myself as loud, but quiet, no. My guess is no one, especially children, considers themselves quiet. “Well, I’m not like Johnston over there, who never knows when to shut the hell up, but I’m not a quiet person.”   

Most of us don’t consider ourselves quiet people, but we concede we’re not loud either. If we were to chart our characteristics on a loud v. quiet graph, comparing ourselves to the people we know, we’d probably dot ourselves somewhere north of the point of origin, on the louder side. How shocked would we be to learn that our own friends and family members dotted us on the south side of the point, as generally quiet people? I knew loud people when I was young, and I knew I wasn’t that, but I was shocked to learn that those who know me best dropped my dot on the quieter side, and they were shocked that I was shocked. It still shocks me that I’m generally considered quieter than most, until I see a member of the loud family.

Have you ever met, or witnessed, such an exaggeration of the opposite that it changed how you thought of yourself? “I never thought of myself as a slob, until I met Darrin. He’s a couple clicks north of OCD.” “I thought I was something of an unemotional robot, until I met Adam.” I dotted myself somewhere on the loud side of the graph, until I witnessed a “so obvious, it was hilarious” member of the loud family in a restaurant I was seated in. I didn’t see her grab a napkin from the dispenser, but from everything I heard from her, in such a short time, I have to imagine that it would’ve been the loudest napkin retrieval I’ve ever heard.

Everything this woman did was loud. Her laughter drew our attention. Then, once she appeared on our radar, we realized how loud she spoke. The words that followed her laugh were part of her laughter, and we could excuse that as a natural flow from the laughter, but when she returned to normal conversation, we could hear everything she said. Her normal conversation volume was a whole bunch of decibel levels higher than any of the other patrons in restaurant.

Have you ever heard a laugh so loud that it could silence an entire restaurant? It wasn’t an “I’ll have what she’s having” laugh. It was a short, polite laugh that she unveiled to respond to a joke someone at her table told, as opposed to the raucous laughter that leads everyone to want to know the joke. It was more of a “What the hell was that?” laugh that can be a little unsettling for a couple of seconds, until we all go back to eat our food and engage in our own private conversations. 

Anytime we talk about loud people, we naturally flow into rude, sloppy, or obnoxious characterizations, but this woman didn’t appear to be any of the above. Some people go loud in an unnatural, over-the-top manner to dominate a room, but for others it just appears to be a more organic characteristic. This woman just had one of those voices, and laughs, that all but echoes throughout a sparsely populated diner.

I’ve sat with some naturally and unusually loud people. When they speak, I just assume everyone in the restaurant can hear every word they’re saying. I assume they can hear our small, personal and private conversations, and I imagine that they don’t want to hear it, but this person is so loud that they can’t help it. I was sure that that quiet couple, over in that quiet corner over there, was trying to block us out and enjoy a quiet meal together, but this guy was so loud that they can’t help but eavesdrop. We could be discussing the differences inherent in the Norwegian versus the German styles of knitting, and the rest of the restaurant hears everything he says, whether they want to or not.

When the person at my table is that loud, my shoulders instinctively cinch inwards as I attempt to camouflage myself with my chair to avoid associations with them, and I instinctually avoid dropping additions to any jokes to try to avoid making them laugh harder. Some part of me knows the patrons aren’t paying near as much attention as I fear, but I can’t help but think that it’s almost impossible for them to avoid listening in.

When I hear loud people, up close and from afar, I know I could never be with them romantically, no matter how loving, caring, or attractive they may be, because I am a private person who doesn’t enjoy drawing unwanted attention to myself. And I never thought I would be this guy. When I was younger, I thought they were the life of the party, and as far as I was concerned it was the louder the better. I don’t know if it was a crush, or a temporary romantic fling I had with the notion that louder is better, or if I was just having more fun in life when I was younger, because I thought louder people were more fun. 

Yet, nestled deep inside this comparative analysis is the idea that I’m not as quiet as some suggest. Loud people, generally speaking, have been loud their whole lives. They were probably loud babies, attention seeking children, and they never had to put much effort into it. It was just who they were, are, and always will be, and I have to think they don’t care for it. I suspect that when they grow up they find that they cannot stand loud people. Most of us, on subconscious levels, abhor what we regard as our most annoying traits. “I hate complainers,” the biggest complainers we’ve ever met say. “Whiners just annoy me,” they whine, and they’re not trying to be ironic or funny when they say it. If two loud people get together romantically, I have to think it won’t last long, because they will find it exhausting on some level that they can’t quite put their finger on. They might be attracted to one another for reasons they can’t explain, and the breakup might be just as inexplicable to them. “I don’t know why we didn’t work,” is something they might say. “Some people just don’t mesh.”

The only person they could see themselves with, long term, would be a quiet person who gives them the space to be who they are. Yet, if we pointed any of this out out to them, they would be so shocked that they’d refute it, “You think I’m loud? What about Billy?” It’s the whataboutism defense, but it’s not a ruse. They genuinely believe that they’re not loud, because they can always find someone louder. If we concede that they’re not as loud as Billy, we might add that they’re still louder than most. “Why do you say that?” they might ask, and we will have to be careful how we answer, because whenever we point out a trait generally perceived to be negative, most people will exaggerate it into an insult.

I didn’t think any less of the loud patron at the restaurant, as I’m able to block out most distractions around my table, but she did draw my attention away from the conversations I was having, and she did so on at least three different occasions. I don’t view it as a negative characteristic, or even a flaw, to be louder or quieter than the average person, but it’s all those other attachments we make, loud equals obnoxious and obnoxious equals rude, and quiet equals shy, insecure, and personality-free that leads us all to fight labels.   

The Sesame Street sketch was done with colorful Muppets characterizing with exaggeration, but if it were done with real people, individuals from both parties would be insulted to learn that we consider them so obvious and simple for us to decide which family they belong in. Most of us will concede that our dot on the graph sits somewhere around the point of origin, but we’re shocked when someone suggests we’re closer to an exaggeration than we know. We might never know, until we hear a humorous exaggeration. Even then, we might hold onto that exaggeration as an example we use to inform people that we’re not as loud, or quiet, as all those Muppets out there.