Tag: the psychology of you

The Thief’s Mentality

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The best thief I ever knew accused me of stealing, lying, and cheating so often that I began to question my integrity. A woman I dated cheated on me so often that I’m still embarrassed that I wasn’t more aware of her infidelities. Her octopus ink involved her accusing me of cheating on her, and she did it so often that I forgot to pay attention to what she was doing to me. If their goals were to prevent me from analyzing them, they did an excellent job because I spent most of my time defending myself around them. Some might call what they did projection, others might call it deflection or obfuscation, but I believe the games these people played fall under a comprehensive, multi-tiered umbrella I call the thief’s mentality.

Kurt Lee introduced me to the confusing mind of a deceptive person. The art of deception was such a key component of his personality that he thought he was able to spot transgressions gestating in the minds of those around us. In the manner a professional saxophone player spots nuances in the play of another, Kurt Lee spotted the intricacies of manipulation around him, and he did so from the same angle of admiration. Yet, he put so much effort and focus into tuning into their frequencies that his instincts often led him astray.

Kurt taught me more about deception than any other person I’ve encountered, movie I’ve watched, or book I’ve read on the subject. He would serve as my prototype for those who would exhibit a wide array of similar traits, traits I would only later deem the characteristics of the thief’s mentality.

The most interesting aspect about him, a characteristic that might defy that which I will describe throughout this piece, was his charm. When it served him, Kurt Lee could be the nicest, most engaging, and infectious person you’ve ever met. He was also a funny guy, and genuinely funny types have a way of disarming us, unless we stick around long enough to learn more about the games they play.

Those who knew Kurt Lee, on a superficial level, envied him for the ways in which he openly defied authority figures without guilt. Those who actually spent as much time around Kurt Lee as I did, however, witnessed that for all the charisma a piece of work (POS) displays, they ultimately end up destroying themselves from the inside out.

One afternoon while on a city bus, Kurt decided to play with the crocheted ball on top of the stocking cap of the elderly woman who sat in front of him. My role in this spectacle may be one of the things I have to answer for on Judgment Day, because I found his appalling act hysterical.

I was young, we both were, but I was so fascinated by this that I now ask myself why? I was learning and learning takes all shapes. We learn Geometry, History, and what to do and what not to do from our peers. We also learn answers to the question of why a young male, in the prime of his life, shouldn’t play with ball atop an old woman’s stocking cap. We learn the difference between a Kurt Lee and ourselves, and the answers are fascinating. Is it all about morality, I asked myself, or does it have more to do with common decency? My mother taught me that when a young, healthy male sees an elderly woman sitting alone, he should smile at her and try to think up something kind to say to brighten her day. My mother taught me to hold the door for her, and she said that I should consider it a privilege to give up my seat to that woman on the city bus, if no other seats were available.

Not only did Kurt Lee ignore those conventions, he chose to pursue the opposite. He chose to violate the sense of security of one of most vulnerable member of our culture by playing with the ball atop her stocking cap. It was wrong on so many levels, of course, but it was also a fascinating exploration of human nature. How would this old woman react? How would a real POS counter her reaction? Why did he do it in the first place? Did he think he would get away with it? Did he even care? I would never know the answer to the latter questions, because I didn’t know Kurt on that level, but my fascination with the answers to the former led me to urge him on with laughter. That was wrong, too, of course, but I now believe my laughter was borne of curiosity. I wanted to learn more about the moral codes by which we all abide. I hoped to learn all that by watching another solidify my rationale, with no regard for the consequences of violating them. My thinking was not that complex, at the time, but I couldn’t wait to see how this episode would end, and I dare say that most of those who are more successful in abiding by the standards our mothers taught us would not have been able to look away either.

The vulnerable, elderly woman eventually turned on Kurt, and she did so with an angry expression. She allowed the first few flicks of the ball atop her stocking cap go, presumably taking a moment to muster up the courage to tell him off, and then she gave him that angry look. Kurt Lee appeared ready to concede to that initial, nonverbal admonition, until he saw me laughing. Egged on by me, he did it three more times before she reached a point of absolute frustration that led her to say something along the lines of, “Stop it, you young punk!”

To that, Kurt began thrusting his hips forward in his seat, while looking at me, whispering, “She just wants unusual carnal relations!” As a teenager trying to elicit more laughter from another teen, Kurt Lee did not use that term. He selected the most vulgar term he could to describe his extrapolation of her desires.

***

Had Kurt Lee decided to stick his middle finger up in the face of a healthier, younger adult, it would have been just as difficult to avoid watching. The fact that he chose such a sacred cow of our culture for his rebellion, however, made his actions over-the-top hilarious. In my young, unformed mind, this was a real life equivalent to David Letterman’s man-on-the-street segments, taken up ten notches on the bold-o-meter. I would later learn that Kurt’s motivations did not involve making profound statements about our societal conventions. He just did things. He was a doer, and doers just do what they do and leave all of the messy interpretations of what they do to others. I would later learn, by watching Kurt Lee, that he selected his victims based on their inability to fight back. In this vein, Kurt Lee was something of a coward, but I couldn’t know the full scope of Kurt Lee at the time. At the time, I found his actions so bold that I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I encountered a wide variety of thieves in the decades that followed Kurt Lee, but they paled in comparison to his mentality, his philosophy, and what drove him to be so different from everyone I had ever met. To listen to him speak on the topic, however, there was nothing different about Kurt Lee. He believed he simply had the courage of his convictions. He ascribed to the more conventional line of thought that we were all afraid to be like him, but he added that the rest of us have had this part of our makeup denied to us by our parents and teachers for so long that we now believe we are different. The import of his message was that this was not about me, and it was not about him. It’s about human nature and the thief’s mentality.

“If you could get away with it, you’d do it too,” was his answer to questions we posed. “You mean to tell me you’ve never stolen anything? Ever? All right then, let’s talk about reality.” Kurt Lee was a thief, and like most thieves, he did not defend his position from the position of being a thief. He would substitute an exaggeration of your moral qualms regarding thievery, claiming that any person who has stolen even once is in no position to judge someone who steals on a regular basis.

In short bursts, and on topic, Kurt Lee could lower the most skilled debater to the ground. We called him a master debater, with the innuendo intended, because it was almost impossible to pin him down on specifics. It was a joy to watch. Prolonged exposure, however, opened up all these windows into his soul.

When we asked him how a guy from the sticks could afford the latest, top-of-the-line zipper pants, a pair of sunglasses that would put an employed fella back two weeks’ pay, and an original, signed copy of the Rolling Stones, Some Girls. He would tell us, but even his most ardent defender had a hard time believing Santa Claus would be that generous to even the nicest kids on his list.

Kurt Lee stole so often by the time I came to know him, the act of shoplifting lost much of its thrill. He decided to challenge himself in a manner top athletes, and top news anchors do, by hiring third-party analysts to scrutinize the minutiae of their performance. He asked me to watch him steal baseball cards from a baseball card shop owner that we agreed needed to learn a lesson, because the man refused to buy our cards 99 percent of the time. On those rare occasions when he agreed to buy them, his offers were so low they were almost insulting.

I posed a theory about our transactions with this shop owner. I theorized that the intent behind his frequent refusals to buy our cards was to establish his bona fides as a resident expert of value. That way, when he informed us that any of our cards were of value, we were ready to jump at the chance, no matter what amount he offered. “By doing so,” I concluded, “he actually makes us feel more valuable, because we think we finally have something worthy of one of his offers.”

“You’re right,” Kurt Lee said. “Let’s get him.”

I felt validated for coming up with a theory that Kurt Lee accepted, but in hindsight, I think Kurt Lee would’ve used anything I said to motivate me to conspire against the owner.

“One thing,” Kurt Lee said before we entered. “I don’t know if this needs to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. Don’t watch me, don’t talk to me, and be careful about how often you look at me. Don’t try to avoid looking at me either.” When I laughed at that, a laugh that expressed some confusion, he added, “Just don’t do anything stupid or too obvious.”

I had reservations, of course, but I considered this an invitation into a world I never knew, and Kurt Lee’s provisos might have been necessary, because I was not only excited by Kurt’s invitation, I was just as nervous and scared. I was what a number of senior citizens called a good kid, and up until the moment I met Kurt Lee, I led a very sheltered existence. Before entering the baseball call shop, I considered the idea that my foreknowledge of this crime could implicate me as an accessory, but I couldn’t shake the asexual intimacy Kurt Lee was sharing with me, with this invitation into his world.

Standing near the door stop, Kurt Lee opened his pockets, in the manner a magician might, and he asked me to confirm that he had no cards in his pockets. I considered that an unusual act of bravado, but I didn’t stop to think about what it implied in the moment.

Throughout the course of our hour spent in the shop, I didn’t witness Kurt Lee steal one thing, and I mocked him for it. “What happened? I thought you were going to steal something,” I said as we stood outside the store. “I’m beginning to think you’re chicken.”

He allowed me to mock him without saying a word. When I finished, he opened his jacket to show me his inner pockets. What I saw knocked me back a couple steps. I actually took a step back when I witnessed the number of baseball cards that lined his inner pockets. I would’ve been impressed if he displayed one card, and three or four would’ve shocked me, but the sheer number of cards he stole without me noticing one act of thievery, led me to believe that Kurt Lee wasted his abilities on the petty act of shoplifting. I considered telling him to try his hand at being a magician for I thought what I just witnessed the skills of a maestro of deception. I was so shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say. If I could’ve managed words, I would’ve said something nerdy about how I thought Kurt should find a way to employ this skill in a marketable way. 

Soon after recovering from that shock, I began to wonder how one acquires such a deft hand. As with any acquired skill, there is some level of trial and error involved, and nestled within that lies the need to find a utility that permits the thief to proceed uninhibited by shame. A skilled performer in the arts or athletics delights in displaying their ability to the world, in other words, but a thief has to operate in the shadows, and they acquire their skill with a modicum of shame attached. Success as a thief, it would seem to those of us on the outside looking in, requires the potential thief to either defeat that sense of shame or find a way to manage it.

Shame, some argue, like other unpleasant emotions, becomes more manageable with greater familiarity. When a father introduces shame to his child, in the brutal assessments he makes regarding the value of his kid, the child becomes intimately familiar with shame before they are old enough to combat it. When such brutal assessments are then echoed by a mother’s concern that their child can’t do anything right, the combined effort can have a profound effect on a child. When those parents then console the child with a suggestion that while the child may be a bad seed, but they’re no worse than anyone else is, something gestates in the child. The moral relativism spawned from these interactions suggests that the search for the definitions of right and wrong is over, and the sooner the child accepts that, the more honest they will become. Seeing their mother scold a teacher for punishing their child for a transgression only clarifies this confusion a little more. In that relativist scolding, the child hears their mother inform the teacher that their child can do no wrong, and they see her unconditional support firsthand. Over time, the child must acknowledge that their parents will not always be there, so they will need to develop internal defense mechanisms in line with what they’re learned. The child also learns to accept these realities for what they are, for the Lee family has never had the courage necessary to commit suicide.

I hated discounting the level of individual ingenuity on Kurt Lee’s part, but he was simply too good at the various forms of deception for it to have been something he arrived at on his own. Attempting to source it might be a fool’s errand, but I wondered if I were able to sort through Kurt’s genealogical tree, if I might find sedimentary layers of grievance, envy, frustration, and desperation that worked their way down to him. To those who consider seeking evidence of foundational layers a bit of a stretch, I ask how much of our lives do we spend rebelling against, and acquiescing to parental influence, and how many of us can say we are entirely free from it?

Poker players tell me that everyone has what they call a tell, which is a twitch, a habit, or a characteristic that we cannot hide when we’re attempting to deceive. “It’s your job to find it during the game,” they say. I don’t doubt what they say. I’m sure we all have tells, and I probably have a ton of them, because I get nervous when I’m being deceitful. When I stole, I felt guilty, ashamed, and I had anxiety issues. What if I kept doing it? What if I had decades of experience? Would I get better at it, and would I find a mechanism to drain the shame of it all? Some in the field of neurology even suggest that research shows that our brains change when we lie more often. Does someone with a thief’s mentality hone the ability to manage emotions most of us normally experience with theft, lying, and cheating so well that it would take a maestro of deception to spot them in the poker game?  

I was so obsessed with this, at one point, that I accidentally stepped over the line between being curious and badgering, something Kurt Lee made apparent in his volatile reaction:

“You think you’re better than me?” Kurt Lee asked, employing the universal get-out-of-judgment free card of moral relativism. This time-honored redirect relies on the lessons taught to us by our mothers, that we are no better than anyone else is, but Kurt’s rant began to spiral out of control when he tried to pivot to what he believed its logical extension.

If no one is better than anyone else is and everyone resides on the cusp of whatever Kurt Lee was, the logical extension required the inclusion of an individual that many perceived to be so harmless it was almost laughable to suggest otherwise. The individual, in this case, was a kid named Pete Pestroni. If Kurt Lee’s arguments were going to hold water, the idea that Pete Pestroni was a wolf in sheep’s clothing would have to become an agreed upon fact. I’m still not sure why Kurt Lee went down the Pete Pestroni road so often, but I suspect it had something to do with the idea that if Pete was immune, in one form or another, everyone else had to be too. In Kurt’s estimation, Pete was just too weak, or too scared, to let his inner-wolf run wild. We would laugh at the implausibility of Pete Pestroni having a Kurt Lee trapped inside, a thief dying to come out, but our intention was to laugh with Kurt Lee. He wouldn’t even smile, however, because some part of him believed that if everyone was a thief, then no one was, at least to the point of separating the thief out for comparative analysis. This was a sacred chapter in Kurt Lee’s personal bible, and an ingredient of the thief’s mentality that took me decades to grasp completely.

The thief’s mentality is a mindset that involves a redirect of exposing an uncomfortable truth, or a hypocrisy, in others, so that the thief might escape a level of scrutiny that could lead to an uncomfortable level of introspection. An individual with a thief’s mentality may steal, but that person is just as apt to lie and cheat. The thief’s mentality begins as a coping mechanism for dealing with the character flaws that drive them to do what they do, but it progresses from those harmless, white lies to a form of deception that requires a generational foundation. 

The thief’s mentality requires deflection, by way of subterfuge, as a means to explain the carrier’s inability to trust beyond the point that they should be trusted, but some thieves’ outward distrust of others reaches a point of exaggeration that says far more about them than those they accuse. Their cynicism is their objectivity, and others’ faith in humanity is a subjective viewpoint, one that we must bear. We live in a dog-eat-dog, screw-or-be-screwed world in which those who trust anyone outside their own homes are naïve to the point of hopelessness. If the listener is to have any hope of surviving in such a world, it is incumbent upon them to see passed the façades and through the veneer, others present to the truth.

The truth, in Kurt Lee’s worldview, held that TV anchors with fourteen-inch parts, and perfect teeth, ended their days by going home to beat their wives. He didn’t believe that a person could attain wealth by honest means. He insisted that because some states convicted some Catholic priests as pedophiles that meant all Catholic priests were, and he had a particular fascination with infidelity in the White House. “You think JFK and Clinton are different? They’re just the ones that got caught is all.” There was also his contention that little old ladies who complained about having someone toy with the balls on the stocking caps just want to have unusual carnal relations. As with most tenets of a person’s worldview, there was some grain of truth in Kurt Lee’s, but he often had to put forth a great deal of effort to support it.

In most such discussions, Kurt Lee’s audience was immune. “I’m not talking about you,” he would say to his audience, so they might view the subject matter from a shared perspective. If we began to view ourselves as an ally, we might join him in convincing our world that he’s not that bad, or the world is as bad as he is. Yet, our agreed upon immunity from his charges begins to fracture in the course of the thief’s logical extensions. When that happens, the thief turns their accusations on us. We might consider ourselves all virtuous and moral, but the thief knows everything there is to know about hidden agendas. They maintain a perpetual state of readiness for that day when we break free of the constraints of morality and loyalty to expose our evil, naked underbelly to the world. The thief has us all figured out, because they know those lies we tell. It’s the thief’s mentality.

Thieves may even believe their exaggerated or false accusations, regardless of all we’ve done to establish ourselves as good, honest people. The validity of their accusation, however, pales in comparison to their need to keep us, the subjects of their accusations, in a perpetual state of trustworthiness. Kurt Lee, and my adventurous ex-girlfriend, made their accusations to keep me in check in a manner they knew I should’ve kept them in check. The import of that line provides us a key to understanding why an individual with a thief’s mentality would make such a charge against us, and the Pete Pestronis of the world who are so honest it’s laughable to suggest otherwise. Some might call such accusations psychological projection, the inclination one has to either deny or defend their qualities by exaggerating comparative examples in everyone else. Others might say that it’s some sort of deflection or obfuscation on the part of the thief, but I believe it all falls under a comprehensive, multi-tiered umbrella that I call the thief’s mentality. Still others might suggest that Kurt Lee’s accusations were born of theories he had about me, the people around him, and humanity in general. If that is the case, his theories were autobiographical.

Whether it was as complex as all that on an unconscious level, or some simple measures Kurt Lee developed over the years to prevent people from calling him a POS, I witnessed some try to turn the table him on the accusations by telling Kurt Lee that other people trust them. “What are you talking about?” they’d ask when Kurt would start in on one of his ‘You’re no better than me’ rants. “My guess is when you come over for family reunions, your aunts and uncles hide their wallets and purses. They don’t do that to me, because I don’t steal, cheat and lie.”

Kurt Lee’s response to this was so clever that I thought it beyond his years. Again, I hate to discount individual ingenuity, but it just seemed too clever for Kurt to deliver as quickly as he did when he said:

“So, if someone trusts you think that means that you’re trustworthy?” Kurt Lee responded. He said the word trustworthy, as if it was an accusation, but that wasn’t the brilliant part of his response. As brilliance often does, his arrived in a section of the argument where the participants will say whatever they can to win, regardless what those words reveal. Kurt Lee suggested, in different words, that those who consider themselves a beacon of trustworthiness are suffering from a psychosis of another stripe. The reason I considered this response so perfect, as it pertained to this specific argument, was that it put the onus of being trustworthy on the person who challenged Kurt Lee’s trustworthiness. It also put further questions regarding Kurt Lee’s character –or what his inability to trust the people in his life said about him– on the back burner, until the questioner could determine whether the level of his own trustworthiness was a delusion that group thought led him to believe.

Crafting the Frame

With all that Kurt Lee taught me about this fascinating mentality, always fresh in mind, I’ve had a number of otherwise trustworthy friends ask me how to deal with the thief in their life. They failed to understand why their loved one couldn’t trust them in even the most benign arenas of life.

It stressed one of my friends out, “I don’t know what I did to damage his trust, but no one’s ever accused me of half of the things he does.” She said that she considered herself a trustworthy person, and she always had, but  she was insecure about it, as we all are. “How do I win him back? How do I regain his trust?” she asked.

“It’s not about you,” I told her. “It’s the thief’s mentality.” I didn’t enjoy saying this to her, because I was basically telling her that she was trapped in a relationship with the afflicted. I explained the mindset of the thief, as I learned it from my personal experiences with Kurt Lee, and she later told me that it helped.

“It helped in a weird way,” she said. “I finally had a name for what he did. Every time he accused me of cheating on him, or wanting to cheat on him, I’d think, it’s the thief’s mentality. It didn’t stop the accusations or the insecurity I felt afterwards, but it helped in a weird way to know that someone else went through all this. It sort of helped me frame him in a way I never considered before.” 

When I told her that she wasn’t trapped in the relationship, she said, “Oh, I know. I could dump him like yesterday’s trash,” but she never did. She ended up marrying the guy. So, whatever short-term relief she experienced with this idea that her loved one was never going to trust her anymore than he trusted himself dispelled it.

The damage thieves, like my friend’s lover and Kurt Lee, incur is irreparable. They likely do not enjoy the lives they’ve created for themselves, and the idea that they can’t even trust the one person in their lives that they could, or should, but their accusations do allow them to spread their misery around a little. It lightens their load to transfer some of their toxins to others. It also gives them a little lift to know that we are a little less trusting than we were before we met them. They must find some relief in the belief that they are not such an aberration, but this relief is temporary, as the toxins that have made them what they are as endemic to the biological chemistry as white and red blood cells. Nevertheless, it must please them to know that after our interactions with them, we now view humanity in the same cynical, all-hope-is-lost manner they do.

If it’s true that a mere two percent are self-aware and reflective, then the lack of self-awareness, at least as it pertains to what we are, and what we are to become, is as endemic to the thief’s mentality as it is in every other walk of life. Like the rest of us, thieves do not believe they live on an exaggerated pole of morality. Rather, they believe they reside in the middle, alongside the rest of us, somewhere just north of the good side of the fuzzy dividing line. They also know that we’re all tempted to do that one thing that could tick us over to the south side. What separates them, to their mind, is their lack of fear, coupled with their refusal to conform to the norms their parents and other mentors taught them. They are also keenly aware that we place most of humanity on their side of the fuzzy line because we all have problems trusting those we don’t know well enough to determine whether they will make moral decisions in life. Some take this natural state of skepticism a step further. Some thieves’ exaggerated, outward distrust for those around them says far more about them than about those they condemn and accuse. It’s the thief’s mentality.

I’m Disgusting, He’s Disgusting, She’s Disgusting, Wouldn’t You Like to be Disgusting Too?

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I considered the national obsession with hygiene a well-played, well-timed joke that we were all in on, until I witnessed two grown men form a friendship based on shared demands for hygienic excellence. In their conversation, they set up a standard of behavioral traits intended to define them as the next step in the evolutionary process that they believed might place them in a pseudo superman, or Übermensch, status beyond the inferior, basic hygiene practices of the common man and woman. I considered their hygienic standard so high that I thought they were exaggerating it for humorous effect. By the time their bond was sealed, however, I realized that this newfound friendship was based not only on respect for the other’s demands for excellence in this regard, but for their hygienic superiority.

I loved the brilliant television show Seinfeld as much as anyone else. I found the main character’s obsessive demands for hygienic excellence so funny that when these two friends of mine began the list of requirements they had for their fellow man an impulsive laugh escaped me. After spending so many years laughing at Seinfeld’s obsessive quirks, my laughter was almost a conditioned reflex, but they weren’t laughing. They had smiles on their faces, but the smiles they shared were not of a sly variety that concealed a clever joke. Rather, they were kind, appreciative smiles, and a recognition that they finally found a likeminded soul in one another.

In the space normally reserved for laughter, they further detailed how the common hygienic habits of their fellow man were gross, and they both agreed that one particular person, our mutual acquaintance, was emblematic of those common habits. Without saying these exact words, they suggested he deserved all the shame that persons of modernity should cast upon him. I spoke with the two men separately a number of times, and they were well versed in the cultural norms, the belief that all men and women are created equal and we should accord them a degree of respect we require of them–unless, apparently, that person decides to leave the bathroom without washing their hands.

The implicit suggestion nestled within this discussion was that as the representative of one with common hygienic practices, I was supposed to recognize that I was gross and completely disgusting, and if I had any designs on becoming friends with either of them, I would have to seriously up my hygienic practices. I was to fear adding input into their conversation for that that might lead to an examination of my hygienic practices and a revelation that my habits were closer to our mutual friend’s than I ever knew. We might also find that what I considered an acceptable hygienic standard to be so disgusting and gross as to be worthy of some sort of public flogging in the public square to set an example for anyone else who might consider basic hygienic standards acceptable.

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“If you’re disgusting and you know it, clap your hands,” is the ostensible mantra of a major news network website that a number of my co-workers visit on a daily basis. The overarching milieu of this site is news, but the regular visitors of the site that I know are aware of little to nothing of the news of the day. Yet, they always have some nugget of information about how we can all improve our hygienic standard of living a little.

“Your kitchen counter is covered with more germs than your floor,” one of my co-workers said when he approached our lunchroom table. “Your dishrags and sponges are cesspools. Using them on a continual basis doesn’t rid your kitchen of germs. It only spreads them around.”

The idea that this particular purveyor of hygienic knowledge was male did not strike me as odd because I considered it less than macho to be hygienic, but he was the first man I met who would prove so obsessed with it. His warning would prove to be the first of many signposts to signal that the obsession I once believed indigenous to the female demographic had now crossed income brackets, social stratifications, and genders.

“Install a lighter-colored counter-top so you can see germs better.”

“Stainless steel is the best defense against the spread of germs.”

“The most germ-ridden room in most homes is the kitchen. Your cutting board can contain up to 200 times more fecal bacteria than your toilet seat.”

“Your fingertips can spread more germs than any tool in your kitchen.” 

The best way to avoid germs, it appears, is to avoid the kitchen, the bathroom, and your fingertips. They’re gross! The bathroom is obvious, but what about your bedroom? Furthermore, if you have any thoughts of going into the basement, you might want to consider investing in a gas mask and a Tyvek suit with hood and boots. Your basement is a cesspool teeming with pathogens no one can pronounce! It’s gross! Disinfect everything! Sanitize! Sterilize! We need more government research on this matter! We could get sick! We could die!

Our mothers taught us that the best way to avoid pathogens is to clean, but modern scientific research dictates that cleaning might be nothing more than a good start. Our mother didn’t know that the optimal way to avoid germs is to religiously and fastidiously clean the cleaning products to the point of sterilization. She used the same sponge and dishrag for more than a week without dipping it into a solution that contained one part bleach to nine parts warm water, and she used the same cleaning products for more than one task with no knowledge of cross contaminants. She didn’t know. 

CBS News reports, “If you’re cleaning up appliances, counter- tops, tables, etc., it’s almost mandatory that you use different cleaning agents. There should be different designated sponges for each function. After you clean up the debris from the meat carcass, place your sponge in this cleaning solution for about a minute or so. That will kill all the potential pathogens.”[1] 

Mom didn’t know.

Mom didn’t consider the idea of placing an industrial air shower to divide the kitchen from the rest of the house, because she was born in a generation that didn’t know anything about these hygienic standards of excellence. She might not have considered putting an industrial-strength anti-radiation shower in her kitchen for the sake of better health practices and greater avoidance of accidental pollination by pathogens. Mom didn’t have the information we do today, so how can we blame her? She didn’t know that it’s best to stay out of the kitchen altogether. Her generation wasn’t privy to the kind of scientific research that discovered that it’s probably safer to stay out of the house, unless that means going outside. The dangers inherent in leaving the house are so obvious that it’s not even worth exploring. We all know that the air outside is just teaming with pathogens, but our mom allegedly had no idea about this. She might have thought it was safe to send us outside to play, but she didn’t have the ubiquitous news sites clamoring for clicks, or the search engines that provide the latest tidbits of science in proper hygiene.

One of the worst conversations the creators of the Seinfeld show, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, brought to American life involved this obsessive level of hygiene. Conversations about hygiene occurred before the Seinfeld mindset began invading our culture and corporations began adding antibacterial agents to our soaps and body washes, but in the aftermath of that great show, it seems that every fifth conversation we hear now involves some form of obsession over cleanliness. We all thought Seinfeld’s obsessions were hilarious, but we had no idea how influential this mindset would prove to be. People now claim, with pride, that they don’t just wash their hands. They use a paper towel to open the bathroom door. “Oh, I know it,” the sympathetic listener proclaims with pride, “that handle is gross!”

No one has a problem with better practices that aim for cleanliness or those that strive for greater hygienic practices, but some, like my two friends, are so obsessed with it that they tip the scale of hygienic standards discussions toward superiority versus inferiority. When they spoke of our mutual acquaintance, the hygienic heretic, their disdain for him sealed whatever bond they needed to declare a friendship based on some kind of perverse superiority they felt regarding the man’s inferior habits.

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A Psychology Today (PT) by Rachel Herz piece details this perversity, stating that some obsessives even avoid shopping carts that have crumpled paper in them.[2] Why do they avoid those shopping carts, because they’re gross? A crumpled piece of paper is evidence that someone else used the shopping cart, at some point, since its creation. We know someone has used this cart before, of course, yet we regard visible evidence of it repellent. Supermarket and department store chains throughout the country have addressed this concern by putting antiseptic wet wipes near the shopping cart area, but that does not address the trauma of spotting a crumpled store ad in a cart. The only remedy for that is selecting another cart, but why should we be forced to select another cart? Why doesn’t someone address our concerns better? It would be one thing if the cart was home to a soiled piece of tissue paper, but what crime against humanity did the crumpled store ad commit? It’s evidence of other people, germs, pathogens, and a general lack of uncleanliness on the part of the store. It also initiates in us, “a desire to keep that which is outside from getting in.”

An interesting note about the emotion of disgust that Ms. Herz adds is that it’s both learned and selective. If a hygienic person with obsessive characteristics happens to see the person who left the crumpled ad in the cart and they find that person somewhat attractive, the potential cart user will not be as disgusted by the crumpled ad and the subsequent use of that cart. If they judge that previous cart borrower to be gorgeous, they will be even less disgusted. To take this idea to its logical conclusion, if the hygienic person with obsessive tendencies sees that the previous cart user was an attractive celebrity, that customer may feel privileged to use the cart regardless the celebrity’s hygienic practices. They might even save the crumpled ad and brag to their friends and family that the gorgeous celebrity touched it. If the previous cart user was somewhat overweight or of foreign descent, however, customers are more apt to select another cart, regardless that person’s hygienic standards.

Those who engage in obsessive hygienic practices also tend to be less inclined to be friends with those with physical disabilities, for images of frailty or illness lead us to avoid having anything to do with that person.

If those obsessed with hygienic practices had someone force them to share a toothbrush with someone, they would be more inclined to share it with a relative, rather than the mailman. This makes sense, because we are more familiar with our family members, and we assume we share some of their immunities.

What doesn’t make as much sense to those who believe their disgust has philosophical purity is the decision-making process that concerns those outside our immediate realm. We view our boss, for example, as a stranger who exists outside our immediate realm. We may interact with our boss daily, but this is not with the same level of intimacy we share with relatives. Our natural inclination is to place that boss below our family members, but the study also suggests we place our boss below the weatherman on the list of people with whom we would forcibly share a toothbrush. If our overriding concern were hygiene, why would we prefer to share a toothbrush with a weatherman we’ve never met to a boss we interact with on a regular basis? A weatherman is often better looking. The weatherman is often better-looking, clean cut, and better dressed. Moreover, there’s a greater possibility that we personally dislike our boss.

“Our attraction toward someone,” the Herz writes, “can override our qualms about sharing body fluids.”

There is one point of inconsistency in the PT article: “Those who avoid objects touched by strangers report fewer colds, stomach bugs, and other infectious ailments,” it states in one place, yet in another it offers, “Exposure to benign bacteria stimulates the immune system so that it is better able to fight bad bacteria.” Perhaps the explanation resides in the word “benign,” but other than that, the two purported facts appear to be contradictory.

The Origin of Disgust

Contrary to internet myths and our own preconceived notions on the subject, disgust is not an innate emotion based on self-preservation. Disgust is, rather, a learned behavior that we learn more about every day, exacerbated by every news report and website we read. Despite the fact that a baby might twist up his face in disgust when force-fed strained squash, his expression does not have a direct link to disgust. Studies suggest that the baby doesn’t really know disgust until they’re 3 years old. “If we were to make a look of disgust to a baby, say when we take out the garbage,” Rachel Herz writes, “the infant is more apt to think we’re mad at them for something than to associate the look with disgust, until they’re three years old.”

This is why babies have no problem eating whatever they find on the floor. It is also why they have no problem crawling through what we consider disgusting debris. They have no understanding of what they should find disgusting and what is not, no matter how often we tell them. It’s the reason my brother and his wife had to keep my nephew away from the dog dish, because he didn’t recognize the difference between the liquid his parents served him in a bottle, and the liquid we place in the dog’s dish.

“Even after we achieve three years of age,” Herz writes, “we don’t have a total understanding of disgust. It is the most advanced human emotion that requires reasoning, thought, and deduction. Humans are the lone animal with a brain advanced enough to process the complexity of disgust, and that knowledge occurs with experience and over time. It is also something we learn more and more about every day, and we get more and more grossed out by what could be deduced as minimal when it comes to actual infection.” 

Those of us who used to think exaggerated obsession with hygiene was nothing more than a brilliant characterization and one of the best recurring jokes to support that joke, now know how wrong we were. We’ve learned that these characteristics can aid in the pursuit of psychological dominance, and they can form friendships with fellow travelers on the road to hygienic excellence.

“You’re all just silly,” I told the two men that formed a friendship based on their hygienic standard. “You’re obsessed with all this.”

“Hey, better safe than sorry,” one of them said. I received that response before from the obsessed, so I expected it. I didn’t expect him to expound on that typical response, “If more people were as obsessed as I am, as you say, I wouldn’t have to be the way I am.”

“I guess,” I’ve responded, “but you do recognize that all these reports about pathogens and sterilizing sponges and counter-tops hit home with some people, until they’re afraid to enter their homes or anyone else’s or go outside. I don’t know anyone who takes all these reports seriously, to the point of adjusting their habits accordingly, but I’m sure there are some. If you met such a person, wouldn’t you consider them silly?”

“Well, yes and no.”

I was disgusting and I didn’t know it, until I met these two. I knew I wasn’t disgusting, but group thought can be difficult to thwart when the one in the minority hasn’t studied the subject in question. The idea that these two men were extreme was not lost on me, of course, but I needed an extreme from the other pole to counterbalance their subtle condemnations. For that, I turned to comedian George Carlin:

“I never take any precautions against germs. I don’t shy away from people who sneeze and cough. I don’t wipe off the telephone, I don’t cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it! My immune system gets lots of practice! It is equipped with the biological equivalent of fully automatic military assault rifles, with night vision and laser scopes … and we have recently acquired phosphorous grenades, cluster bombs, and anti-personnel fragmentation mines …. So, when my white blood cells are on patrol, reconnoitering my blood stream, seeking out strangers and other undesirables, if they see any—any—suspicious-looking germs of any kind, they don’t [mess] around. They whip out the weapons, and deposit the unlucky fellow directly into my colon! Directly into my colon! There’s no nonsense. There’s no Miranda warning, there’s none of that three-strikes-and-you’re-out [mess]. First offense, BAM! Into the colon you go.

“Speaking of my colon, I want you to know I don’t automatically wash my hands every time I go to the bathroom, okay? Can you deal with that? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. You know when I wash my hands? When I [mess] on them! That’s the only time, and you know how often that happens? Tops, tops, two to three times a week … tops! Maybe a little more frequently over the holidays. You know what I mean?

“And I’ll tell you something else my well-scrubbed friends… you don’t need to always need to shower every day, did you know that? It’s overkill, unless you work out or work outdoors, or for some reason come in intimate contact with huge amounts of filth and garbage every day, you don’t always need to shower. All you really need to do is to wash the four key areas; armpits, [anus], crotch, and teeth. Got that? Armpits, [anus], crotch, and teeth. In fact, you can save yourself a whole lot of time if you simply use the same brush on all four areas! [3]

[1]http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500178_162-697672.html?pageNum=2&tag=contentMain;contentBody 

[2]Herz, Rachel. “The Cooties They Carry.” Psychology Today. August 2012. Pages 48-49.

[3]https://www.lingq.com/lesson/george-carlin-fear-of-germs-235986/

Most People Don’t Give a Crap About You

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Enter some old wise man.

Every day, at eleven A.M., a crotchety, old professor walked through our school’s cafeteria. He had a bag lunch, but he insisted on grabbing a tray to lay his lunch out on. I don’t know if the man was as wise as the typical old man is, or if he was any wiser. I do not know if the man had any allegiances, as his lectures did not favor a religion, a gender, race, political party, persuasion, or class. He didn’t favor students either. I didn’t love too many classes through the years, but I loved his class. He didn’t care. He was a teacher who was at the tail end of his career, and much of the passion he had for teaching was gone. He was still a great teacher, however, and I wanted him to know that I was a willing and eager student. He didn’t care. It was frustrating.

When we tell people others crucial, character-defining moments in our lives, we expect them to side with us, the storytellers, regardless how they feel about it in private. This old man didn’t bother with such pleasantries. It was annoying. I reached a point where I wanted him to tell me that I was correct about one thing, and I wanted him to acknowledge it in an unequivocal manner. He did tell me I was correct in some circumstances, but he added so many qualifiers that I never arrived at a sense of satisfaction in his company. I never left his class, or his lunch table, feeling that I had the correct answer about anything. As a result, I sought his counsel on a number of issues that plagued me.

He never seemed pleased by my need to seek his counsel, nor did he appear annoyed by it. He never greeted me in a pleasant fashion, but he was not rude. He was the type of guy that I’ve always tried to please. A dog acts this way, I realized before I approached him with one particular question. A dog finds the one person in the room ambivalent to its existence, and it attempts to befriend them. The dog is accustomed to all humans fawning over it, and when one person in the room does not gush over its cuteness, they feel a challenge to their essence, and the dog cannot move on until it convinces that one person that it’s as cute as everybody else thinks it is.

Some have complimented me for my objectivity, and they’ve said that my observational skills exceed most of those they encounter, so why do I continue to seek the counsel of the one person that doesn’t acknowledge my attributes in any way? Am I as insecure as the attention craving dog with an identity crisis? Did I need him to tell me, “You’re the one living life the way it should be lived?” The answer was that I saw this man’s ambivalence as objectivity. I thought he might be the one to answer my questions about life in a manner that was neither complimentary nor insulting, and he did … in one short, ambivalent sentence.

“My friend and I have been having a debate,” I informed the crotchety, old professor. “I believe people are inherently good, until they prove otherwise.” I told him that I considered living with an optimistic mindset the only way to live. I told him that optimistic people should be prepared to be wrong about humanity on occasion, but that that anecdotal evidence should not dissuade them from the overriding belief that most people are decent.

“My friend thinks this is a naïve way of approaching humanity,” I continued. “He thinks it’s best to live by the idea that everyone you run across is corrupt, until they prove otherwise. You shouldn’t trust anyone outside your immediate family, he said. This mindset will prepare you for that slime ball you encounter that attempts to dupe you out of everything you hold sacred. Not everyone we run across will be evil, he concedes, but it’s best to be prepared for those that are.”

“I’ll give you a third possibility,” this professor said chewing on some awful smelling, squishy sandwich. “Have you ever considered the possibility that most people don’t give a crap about you?”

It may have been twenty years since that professor dropped that line on me, but it’s had such a profound impression on me that I still can’t shake it. It’s as if he said it to me yesterday. I stayed on topic with this professor. I didn’t consider that a quality answer, at the time, and I continued to belabor the point until I drove him down into what I considered his core answer. Long story short, I don’t remember anything he said after that short, quick response. I forgot that response too, until it started to pertain to more and more situations in life, and I had to admit that it was a relatively profound assessment.

Most of us know, on a certain level, that the people around us don’t give a crap about us. We know we don’t give a crap about them either, but how many things do we do in one day to convince the others around us that we’re wonderful people? How many times do we stop all laughter at the bar to say something important, so someone might think we’re more intelligent, more politically astute, and savvy, and crafty, and how many posts do we put on Facebook to convince those on the other side of the political aisle that they are, in fact, wrong? How many times do we read and write sentences, such as those, with the belief that we’re discussing others, as if we’re above it all? We’re right, they’re wrong, and they’re fools for believing that anyone gives a crap what they think.

Depending on the nature of our interactions, most people don’t care if we have an optimistic outlook on them that offers them a chance to be wonderful. Most people won’t approach us based on different if our perspective is positive or negative. Most people don’t give a crap about us, or our perspective on life. The slime balls and shysters of the world don’t give a crap either. They aren’t more wary of us based on how prepared for them, or if we are more prepared for them, and the very idea that we believe that we’re more prepared for them may, in fact, be our undoing when they flip the page on us and become the guy that we want them to be. They’re bad guys, and this is what they do, but that doesn’t mean they give a crap about what we may think of them when our interaction is complete.

Enter the salesman.

Anyone who has had a stressful sales job, with commission-based compensation, knows that a majority of the population prepare for slime ball, sales people. Most people employed in sales aren’t slime balls, but they prepare for those of us who think they are.

On day one, those training for sales positions receive a massive binder that could kill a thirty-pound Beagle if dropped from a decent height. This binder contains a training manual that contains a reactions chapter, given to us by the sales training team. As with everything else in life, the language in sales’ training manuals is not as overt as the illustration I will provide here, but anyone that has been on a sales training team knows that the reactions chapter is the chapter that the training team devotes the most time to in training sessions.

The “No thank you” chapter of this massive training manual teaches the incoming salesperson how to deal with polite refusals. To find this information, the salesperson learns to turn to page twenty-three of the “reactions” section of this sales training manual. If the salesperson receives a “hell no!” they’re instructed to turn to page forty-six of the reactions section, and if they receive that witty retort –that their potential client thought up that morning in the mirror– in preparation for a slime ball like them, “If it’s so great why don’t you buy it?” they turn to page sixty-nine. If the reaction they receive is a rehearsed one that calls a sales person out for being the slime ball that they know salespeople are, “Because I know slime balls,” salespeople learn that all they have do is to turn to page ninety-two for a suitable response.

The best defense, for potential clients that do not want to become one, is to take a step back and realize that they’re in the majority of those people who don’t trust salespeople, and that they’re in a majority of people who believe they have the perfect witty response to put a salesperson in their place. This defense also requires an acknowledgement from the potential client that they cannot play this game better than salespeople can. This is our home turf, and we know how to play this game better than those we call. The responses they give trainees are focus group tested and focus group approved. These responses are determined to be the best, most polite way of saying we don’t give a crap about you.   

Salespeople, don’t give a crap that their potential clients might be the smartest man who ever walked the earth. The corporation, the training team, and their manual, teach us to avoid wondering if we might have a good guy on the line. They train us to make the sale, regardless what the call recipient might think of us, or our abilities. If a potential client wants to know the super-secret way of defeating a salesperson at their game and a method that will separate them from the pack who will have their psychology twisted and turned into a sale, all salespeople know the solution. It involves the psychological complexities inherent in hanging up the phone in the midst of the salesperson’s sales pitch.

In about every cold call, sales job I’ve had in telemarketing firms, there is one constant: the salesperson cannot to hang up the phone. No matter what “the smartest man that ever walked the earth” on the other end of the phone says, the salesperson cannot hang up. A sales rep has sales quotas, and time allotments for each call, and the smart people “who know slime balls when they happen upon them” are wasting everybody’s time by trying to outdo us. By hanging up the phone, the potential client is saving themselves, and the slime ball, salesperson on the other end of the line, a lot of time and frustration.

After spending so much time in training, strategy meetings, and coaching sessions, I thought I found the perfect solution, and the ideal rationale to back up that solution that could help so many of my friends avoid the frustration of a sales call. I told them that the only action the reactions portion of the training manual doesn’t cover, because it can’t, is the hang up. It is fool proof, I told my friends. I received blank, “of course” stares. No one refuted my findings, but no one followed them either.

This is the point where the line ‘psychological complexities inherent in hanging up the phone’ comes into play, for most people cannot simply hang up a phone. Nice people think that hanging up phone violates everything their mother taught them about etiquette. The nice people think that the salespeople might be nice people too, and they feel bad that the salespeople who are working so hard to make this sale. Hanging up, in the middle of someone else’s sentence is rude and mean, and they can’t violate the standards no matter who the other person on the line is. There are others, however, and they are the focal point of this piece. They are the ones who have too much invested in the idea that they are one of the very few people on the planet who can spot a slime ball and beat them at their game, and hanging up the phone just seems too easy and too anti-climactic.

Most salespeople are no smarter, or craftier, than anyone else is, but we have huge advantage: years, sometimes decades, of focus tested material at our disposal. Our training teams have learned from the trial and error experiences of the salespeople in their company, and other companies trading trade secrets, regarding the best ways to flip a potential client. They have alternatives available for just about every type of personality who chooses to work in sales for them. Most of these companies have hundreds of salespeople on the floor making calls, and they know that most people are not aggressive self-starters. They have fashioned responses for these people to help them sound smart, crafty, and pleasing to the average potential client. Therefore, the next time a potential client receives a phone call from a potential slime ball. My advice is to hang up the phone. The potential client may consider this a battle at the O.K. Corral, and they are prepared to do battle with nothing but their wits. If this is the case, they may want to consider the idea that their adversary has a focus-tested, rapid-fire machine gun.

If a potential client is fortunate enough to run across a salesperson who cannot match the potential client’s perspicacity and insurmountable wit, and the salesperson cannot respond to the witty retorts that they thought up that day in the mirror, that salesperson might land themselves in a boardroom for coaching tips. These coaching tips will revolve around the concept that the salesperson should stop caring so about what potential clients say. If that salesperson cannot overcome their sense of empathy and compassion, a salesperson who can will replace them.

For those “slime balls” who strive to excel in sales, a sales call can be like an inescapable penitentiary to a convict. Inmates don’t give a crap that good men have spent their lives designing and fortifying a fortress to make it impossible to escape. Most inmates aren’t the type to appreciate craftsmanship, until they begin searching for that one weakness in the structure. The very idea that they consider this fortress inescapable is what intrigues them. They spend their days and nights focused on finding that crack in the walls good men have built to keep them in. Few inmates believe they are bad guys who need to do time for the crime they committed. They want freedom. They want to escape.

Quality salespeople approach sales in the same manner, in that they don’t give a crap if anyone considers them a wonderful person. They spend countless hours in training seminars and strategy sessions, trying to find the perfect way to flip someone like you. They discuss you on their lunch hour, and they take you to the after work bar to discuss the minutiae of your phone call with their peers. As hard as they try to separate their work life from their home life, they will take your wit and intellect home with them, they will discuss you with their spouse, they will eat you with their tuna salad sandwich, and they will spend hours of insomnia staring at the ceiling with you in mind. It’s not about being nice or mean to a quality salesperson, and it’s not even about the product they’re selling. As many top-tier salespeople will tell anyone interested, sales is not about selling a product as much as it is about a salesperson selling themselves.

If you’ve ever been in sales, in an office of hundreds of people, you’ve witnessed a salesperson lose it: 

“How dare you say that to me?” one man said into the microphone attachment of his headset. “Sir, that’s uncalled for,” he said at another point in his phone call with an irate customer. “I understand sir, but I don’t think that personal insults are necessary.” 

This particular salesman was a tenured agent on the floor, and my interactions with him led me to believe he was a levelheaded feller who was in full control of his emotions. This phone call appeared to have him on the verge of tears. I wondered, for a moment, if he was ill suited for the job. I flirted with the notion that he may have been doing this for so long that he suffered from burn out. I also wondered if I was suited for the job, for if this otherwise this levelheaded guy could fall prey to hysterics, anyone could. When his call ended, I asked him if he was okay. My concern was more self-serving than an actual concern I had for his well-being.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“What?” he asked. He laughed and made a clicking noise with his mouth, followed by a wave of his hand, to suggest that the phone call hadn’t affected him in any way. “Just making the sale,” he said filling out a ticket that we all had to complete after completing a sale.

My “Are you all right?” question became an ongoing joke for a little while, any time an agent engaged in theatrics to complete a sale. “I’m fine,” the responding jokester would say fluttering a completed ticket in the concerned, fellow jokester’s face. “Just fine.”      

My time spent as a phone sales agent taught me as much about human psychology, as it did sales. It taught me that when the prospective client enters the salesperson’s domain with all of their witty responses and refusals, that if these salespeople are any good at what they do, they will understand more about the potential client’s psychology than the potential client does. Coupled with the strategy sessions, and peer review, is the eight hours a day, forty hours a week, hands on application and trial and error of dealing with the best response the client has ever heard regarding a sales call from an annoying telemarketer.

The most shocking aspect for those who receive non-stop, telemarketing sales calls might be that to a tenured salesperson exploiting a client’s weaknesses no longer provides much of a thrill. Most experienced salespeople, schooled in the art of understanding a potential client’s psychology, learn so many ways of flipping potential clients into the sale that doing so becomes nothing more than something they do in the course of a day at work.

Enter the Panhandler.

A panhandler also doesn’t give a crap about the person who hands them money. They may manipulate the psychology of the generous person for the period of time it takes to complete the transaction, but the minute that transaction is complete, they will turn to the next pedestrian or driver. They won’t remember anything about that your generosity. They may remember that someone handed them a twenty-dollar bill, as opposed to the fives they’ve received from everyone else, but that will only change the calculations of how much money they’ve received to that point. They may be fond of the charitable giver during the time it takes to complete the transaction. They may even give that person some of the obligatory responses that are sought, but that’s to feed into the ego of their giver, and the general sense of altruism that may encourage the giver to believe their altruistic enough to give out another twenty in the future. When a panhandler proceeds to purchase their goods, however, they won’t smile when they think of the overwhelming generosity they’ve encountered that day. They won’t think of the person that someone gave them a twenty, as opposed to a five, because they don’t give a crap about them.

They also won’t give a crap that a hard working person with a couple extra bucks trusts them to do something fruitful with the money they’ve given them. As far as the panhandler is concerned, it’s their money now, and they’ll do whatever the hell they want with it.

“That guy must’ve been feeling real guilty about something,” they may say when they are gathered with their snickering peers in regards to the twenty dollar bill fella, but that generous person doesn’t care that they may say that. That’s not why they gave them some of their hard-earned money. They had no agenda. They did it because they’re a generous person with a wonderful sense of altruism about them. Bottom line. If that’s the case, they should continue to give panhandlers money. They should not do it with the belief that the recipient of their largesse will think that they are a better person for doing it. They won’t. They will not consider that person bad for giving them the money, of course, and they may not even consider them were a chump for doing it, but my guess is that they accept that person’s money with all of the consideration, and emotion, of a courteous ticket taker at a movie theater completing a similar transaction.

Enter the Fashion Aficionado.

Nobody gives a crap what we wear either. That might be a bit of a stretch, as we’ll discuss below, some will notice, but they are in the minority. We’ve all received compliments for the clothes we’ve worn, and we’ve all adjusted our wardrobe based on compliments and mockery. Clothes make the man, is something we’ve all said for generations. ‘People pay attention,’ some say. ‘I’ve heard it. I’ve witnessed it firsthand.’ We’ve all met the asterisks, the people who notice, but unless we’re the type who wears the finest clothes known to man, and we constantly remind our peers that we will wear nothing but, a greater percentage of the people we run across will not remember anything about another what we wore that day when we thought everyone knew. Some will notice, of course, and they are the people we consider when we dress. We dress to impress, but how many notice? How many people, in a room full of let’s say twenty, will notice anything about our clothing choices for the day? Our conceit leads us to believe that it’s more than you may think, for most people don’t vocalize their impressions, but the reality suggests otherwise.

In a psychological study, cited in David McRaney’s book You are Not so Smart, one subject of a psychological experiment wore a flamboyant Barry Manilow T-shirt, as instructed. The others who volunteered to partake in an experiment, without knowing the particulars, refused to wear such a flamboyant, attention-grabbing shirt. They didn’t think their pride could take the hit. They believed that the subjects of the experiment would forever label them the guy who wore the Manilow T-shirt that one day. The subject who agreed to wear the shirt received instructions to walk into an auditorium of students to ask the professor a question. He didn’t do anything more or less to draw attention to himself, or his shirt. The result: 25% of the students in the class that day remembered any details about the kid who walked in or the shirt interrupter wore. In a separate part of the same experiment McRaney cites, a subject received instructions to wear the finest duds available to man and interrupt a professor’s class in the exact same manner. The result: 10% of the students in the class remembered any details about the finest duds available to man. Very few people give a crap about what we’re wearing, and even fewer remember what we wore yesterday, because most people aren’t paying near as much attention as we think and even fewer give a crap about us.

Nobody gives a crap that we just messed up in our speech. They don’t even care when we apologize for our mess up. As David McRaney suggests, “Most people don’t pay enough attention to a speech to know that an error was made, until the speaker draws attention to that error by stumbling, losing their place, or apologizing for their error.” Most people just want us to get on with it, so they can go home to watch their shows.

How many of us have committed a show stopping error that we assumed everyone in the auditorium noticed? We stopped in our speech, under the assumption that it would be pointless to continue. We believe that we have just lost all credibility with our audience. We look out into our audience with an overwhelming sense of shame. Yet, how many times have we witnessed an individual commit an error? How many times have we wanted that speaker to go back and correct the error? It’s been my experience, as an audience member, that we just want the speaker to get on with it. Most people in an audience don’t care that we just mispronounced “Nucular”, or “Eckspecially”, or that we may have mixed up our tenses, or lost our place. They just want us to get to the reason they decided to attend our seminar in the first place.

How many errors do professional speakers committed in one hour? How many of those errors did we consider egregious? Yet, we watched the professional speaker move on, as if nothing happened? ‘How can they do that?’ we wonder with amazement. ‘That was an egregious error that would’ve crippled us.’ The professional speaker knows that most people aren’t paying near as much attention as we are, and the fact that they are able to move on is what has separated them from the rest of us in the course of giving a speech. That hutzpah is what has made them a speaker that people are willing to pay to hear.

The very idea that the speech we are delivering should’ve been perfect was our dream scenario. If we can find a route around our self-indulgent desires that this speech may have been the greatest speech delivered since they laid Winston Churchill to rest, we might find that most people care far more about how a speech is delivered than they do what was delivered in that speech. They may want a nugget of information that they didn’t have before entering the ballroom, and if that speaker can deliver that, everything else will fade in their memory.

A fellow employee of mine wore mismatched shoes one day. It was a real life exclamation point to me. One was a running shoe, and the other was a dress shoe. The shift we were on was the night shift, so we can only assume he didn’t just wake up for a poor night’s sleep and put his shoes on. The point of including this story is no one noticed, until I pointed it out to them. How could no one notice? Two mismatched running shoes, or dress shoes, might be noteworthy, but a dress shoe and a running shoe should be an exclamation point that should lead to staring. How do they not notice? How did he not notice, walking about? Most people don’t notice on an otherwise boring Tuesday night. 

Nobody gives a crap when someone has mustard on their collar, that they have mismatched socks, or that they haven’t talked all day because they’re upset about the fact that their husband has become lactose intolerant. We may listen to their complaints, but how many times do we hear them? If they say, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m so quiet today?” how many times did we notice that they weren’t speaking? How many times did we fail to notice, because we were focusing on our own problems? Some of the times, we tell people our problems, because it feels better to talk about them. Are they listening, or are they thinking that their problems are so much worse? In the end, neither party gives a crap, because most people aren’t paying enough attention to one another. We just want our workday to end, so we can get on with the lives that most people don’t give a crap about.