What Do Humans Do All Day: A Taxonomy of Posing

A loose collection of notes gathered in the hope of achieving a broader view.

Personality Cloning
From my posting "Highly Imitative Aliens":

There are a few dozen clone lines in any society, no more. People are types, which is adaptive behavior because it lubricates social interaction. When you meet a brassy lady with a gravelly voice and energetic good humor, you feel that you know that person. Love her or hate her, you can deal with her comfortably due to long experience with her clone line. Same for the aloofly ponderous academic. Or the BAD BOY. No one's born as these things. The personas are adopted via modeling, these days mostly via movie and TV actors. In the old days, one modeled the persona of a family member or another local "role models" (turn that phrase around in your mind for a moment!).

We really commit to the role. People never feel more expressively uniquely themselves than when they're being most flagrantly clone-ish. That's how the millions driving VW bugs or listening to "indie rock" manage to feel fiercely nonconformist. "I'm a free-thinking type! One of those!"

Skinner Boxes
From my posting "A Tale of Two Chickens":

A Skinner Box is any setup rewarding "good" behavior and punishing "bad" behavior. If you imagine that humans have transcended the animal kingdom, start looking for Skinner Boxes in the animal world (e.g. reproduction = good = reward; not sleeping/eating/drinking = bad = punishment), and you'll find that every damned one of them not only engages humans but absolutely captivates us. The shitty reward pellets are THE GREATEST THING EVER ("Go Cubs!!!").

Whenever we find ourselves in Skinner Boxes - as we do a zillion times per day - we instinctively strive for the cookie, and avoid the electric shock. We're no fools. We know how the game's played.

From "Exiting the Skinner Box"

If you pay close attention, you'll notice the reward is always chintzy (which explains why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).

The chicken, trained to endlessly hit the button which rewards with a corn pellet (and not the one which punishes via mild shock), thinks it's just killin' it.

Pattern Matching
Humans treat other humans like ornithologists treat birds. We glance at coloring, and at wings and beaks, and feel like we know. This, of course, is category error. Humans are not birds. Though our plumage might indeed communicate something, it's certainly never the last word. But we curate internal spreadsheets full of snap judgements—"this means that"— based on superficial parameters. Also: based on abstractions—if you're wealthy or smiley or Moslem, it means that.

Pattern matching isn't just a sloppy first pass. It most often "sticks". Shockingly scant attention is paid to the individuality of individuals, or even acknowledgement that such consideration is warranted. Few notice the gap.

Pattern matching doesn't just inform our reality; it establishes it. So when someone fails to epitomize their apparent characteristics, they’re blamed. "Why are you not matching your pattern?"

From my posting Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You:

Whenever I meet someone new who recognizes "Chowhound" if it comes up in discussion, I always get the same disbelieving reaction:

Huh? Hold on. That was you? YOU?!?

At this point, I stop the conversation and beg the bewildered, skeptical person to explain what, exactly, they expected. It's not that I'm being defensive or confrontational. It's that I genuinely don't know how a Jim Leff is supposed to look or act! No one ever taught me how to act like someone like me!
...
I never receive a satisfactory answer. It's not that they expected me to travel with a security team, or to address them with smug condescension. They don't have any particular image in mind. Just certainly not that.

Tripwires
This is pattern matching with alarms set. Certain words and ideas trigger tripwires. Anyone using any such language becomes, first and foremost, A Speaker Of Those Words, with utter disregard for their intention, context, or track record. The pattern is matched, the bell rings, and they suddenly disappear into a category.

From my posting "Sticks & Stones":

As a professional writer, I have a shrinking palette of expressible thoughts and a growing pile of taboo words and phrases (which can't even be used to express "nice" things, because everyone's blindly pattern-matching so they can point-and-shriek at deviants).
...
Thirty years of socially electrocuting anyone saying "nigger" in any context and with any intent has not tamped down actual racism one iota. It's a failed experiment.

Face-In-Hole Board
Few can resist a snapshot with their face appearing within a hole in a board painted to assume the persona of a super hero, medieval knight, etc. "Hey, look! I'm a farmer! It's me doing that thing!"

"It's me doing that thing!" is what the world is about. That's the core presumption, distilled to its essence.

And it baffles me, because I've never felt the impulse to grab such a snapshot, even while actually doing the thing. I'm not a seemer. My satisfaction comes from doing things, not from seeming like a thing-doer.

Most legit body builders, despite their physiques, are still skinny kids at heart, still sticking their heads into face holes and urging "Hey, look!" And most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

N.B.: Astoundingly, we view Impostor Syndrome as a malady. To me, it seems like the gateway to sanity. A glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel vision. A softly buzzing bedside alarm clock.

Rich People's Problems
I don't have to explain this one. We all know what it is.

And that baffles me. Why is it so easily grokked? You'd expect people, lost in self-dramatization, to ask "What do you mean?" and to deny they'd ever do any such thing. But our clear recognition of this—and our willingness to sheepishly confess our tendencies—suggests that, at some level, we always knew how performative this all was.

The only thing we miss is that virtually all our problems are "Rich People's Problems". If you ask a modern First Worlder what their great-grandfather might make of any given dilemma or disappointment, it's hard to imagine any response but an amused chortle.

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So what do humans do all day? The above. Mostly that stuff. And, sure, they all bleed into each other. These are just some of the most prominent buckets.

One commonality: all involve poses. But the term "pose" is far too thin to stretch across such vast terrain. For fish, "swimming" is not some distinct activity.

Posing—in all these ways and more—isn't something we do. It's all we do, virtually all the time. We have some distant notion of what it might mean to Be Real, but it quickly turns glorious. The prospect of not-being-completely-full-of-shit compels us into a reverent hush—a brush with God-fearing mystery. I once noted that the term “soul” was invented by poseurs to identify the mysterious and unobservable part that’s not posing.

If we direct attention to the relentless posing, we might eke out a sliver of distance. And once we realize how we pose, and how much we pose, posing becomes something we watch ourselves do. So an aloof observer steps back, and perspective arises. The birth of wisdom? Nah, just dropping character. A subtraction, not a power-up.

In time, you identify more with the watcher than with the (hilariously flimsy) contrivance. This reframing is the gateway to a higher perspective that is delightfully bulletproof. But the final key is to behold a world of posing poseurs without superiority, or adolescent sneering. Both, after all, are just more posing. Best of all is a blithe shrug and some bemused participation. Hopefully less frantic.

In "Why God Lets Bad Things Happen", I wrote that "The solution is to wear it all much more lightly, and to remember that the rollercoasters are merely rides (we waited on line!), not oppressors."

It's not that posing's some sort of sin. Again, it's what we do. But fraught posing is needless torture.

Well-Meaning Guys Under Siege

Chowhound was racking up $300/month in data transference surcharges, and I didn't have it. Our massive popularity was straining the rented server, and we were forced to pay for it.

I needed to devise some profit streams, and fast, so I supervised design and execution of a line of t-shirts and tchotchkes such as the Chowhound Passport—sliding cards reading "Give me the real stuff, not the tourist stuff" in eight languages to show one's waiter. Plus a bundle of newsletters which I'd edit and distribute in my spare time.

A thousand passports arrived, to my surprise, unassembled. They needed to be laboriously folded and glued. I threw a party for some friends to help assemble them. In an ideal world, I'd have plied them with great food and drink, but all I could swing was beer and chips. Anyway, we assembled just 100. Not nearly enough.

One attendee sighed and volunteered to tackle the rest as a Zen exercise in gracious patience. A week later, she handed me back 900 passports, ready to go. And of course I thanked her, but not, like, a LOT. And I didn't subsequently include her in my life—because even my best friends weren't included in my life, which was crammed full of seven full time unpaid jobs (while desperately trying to make rent on the side). It was clearly non-viable, but I didn't want to disappoint a million nice people by shutting down that monstrous albatross of a website.

I sold the operation a few years later, and, a year after that, the corporate machinery spat me out like a lead slug, and then there was recuperation and then various ingenious and heartfelt ventures which all drew vacant stares. Decades were passing. I'd tried reconnecting with old friends, but they'd all moved on. A few were jealous, most just indifferent. And I never reapproached this person. So much time had gone by.

Relatable, right? If so, it's only because I've convincingly shared the framing of a well-meaning guy under siege. But imagine the perspective of that other person.

I've written all this to share one single nugget of insight you might want to bear in mind: Well-meaning guys under siege can look like assholes.


"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

Proof of Concept

If you've been reading this Slog for some time, and want to check whether it's benefited you in any tangible way, watch this 2 minute Instagram video of Ezra Klein explaining something that lots of people find surprising and mysterious. A new way of parsing people's inner workings.

Maybe it won't feel quite so shocking and mysterious for you. See if you have a slightly shrewder understanding of the basis for this than your average Joe.

Analogies are Lost Technology

We can’t make analogies anymore. They are essentially "Lost Technology"—familiar to our ancestors but now mysterious to us.

The problem is, everyone expects them to work sideways.

Example:

Person A: “Telling me (considering my weirdly loud voice) that I need to “speak up” is like telling Michael Jordan he needs to practice his layups!”

Person B: “So you’re comparing yourself to Michael Jordan, huh?”

Try using an analogy, and some shithead will tilt it sideways and smugly declare rhetorical victory. An onlooker might vaguely frown, sensing something's off but unable to say what. That lingering doubt is all that's left.

In the 17th century, uneducated peasants eagerly digested Shakespeare’s fancy, subtle wordplay. In 2025, analogy seems like a shiny semantic monolith that mostly just spooks the apes.

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I once noted that we also can't make reasonable generalizations if they might rub a single reader the wrong way. For example, you can't get away with this now:

Tall people tend to dislike small cars.

There is 100% certainty someone will angrily lash back:

I'm tall, and I'm perfectly fine with small cars!

Hedging terms don't help at all, e.g. "Deaf people often wear hearing aids," or "Many children enjoy spaghetti."

Restaurant Chairs and the Secret of Human Existence

Sheer speculation based on knowledge of human nature: What percentage of restaurateurs would you suppose actually try sitting in the chairs they buy for their restaurant? Let's leave out the 15% top-end fanciest ones who are well-trained to consider comfort.

I'd guess 25%. (ChatGPT, which makes a great sounding board if you don't lead it with your own guess, guessed 35%)

And how much more future success would you imagine that fraction will have with their restaurants? I guessed "considerable". (Without leading the chatbot, it guessed the same.)

The observation sheds light on foundational truths behind some unexplained phenomena.

"Grandma's chicken soup is soulful because she cooked it with love" is a nice plummy saying for a wall hanging. But let's say it straight: Grandma doesn’t utilize accepted procedures with approved ingredients to meet soup adequacy thresholds. No, grandma gives an actual fuck.

And not just as some abstract principle, but she maintains that framing. The soup eater matters, so every onion is cut, and every stir is executed, with an unshakeable connection to the eater. "People I care about will sit in this chair. I (viscerally!) want them (need them!) to feel a certain way. So I keep asking: how will it seem for them?"

It’s not florid love. It’s simple empathy.

Why are some things so viscerally good? Why do wholes occasionally exceed the sum of their parts? And when they do, why can't the result be replicated by following a formula or recipe? Rote formula-followers get dull results because it's never, ever, about how it all seems for the other person.

This explains one of the most mysterious chunks of the human experience. And, practically speaking, it's a framing that works beautifully as an all-purpose tool for doing life: GIVE A CRAP. DON'T TREAT EVERYTHING/ANYTHING AS A DRY ABSTRACTION. DRINK YOUR OWN LEMONADE. CONSIDER THE OTHER GUY'S EXPERIENCE AND FRAMING.

And don't make it theater, where you stoke an image as Mr. Thoughtful who cares so very deeply. Don't be a silly peacock. Just actually do it.

Simply flip your framing, and hold there: "How will it all seem for THEM?" That's the ballgame. You won't just be ensuring good results; you'll make yourself a stoker of magic—a vastly better proposition than working blindly to spec like an insentient robot.


If your situational awareness sucks—if you can't even register the existence of The Other, much less inhabit their perspective—don't open a restaurant. In fact, don't do anything. Just go away.

Secular Zen with Bourgeois Teeth

A section of my recent posting, "Hell in a Chaise", was bugging me, so I edited it. It now reads:

Put a rich person in a luxurious chaise longue before a million dollar view, wave palm fronds so he's not too warm, adjust his umbrella so it's just sunny enough, swathe him in tanning lotion because his dermatologist says he's extra susceptible, massage his feet, ply him with snacks and cooling drinks, and attend to every last desire, fear, preference, and whimsy—and he'll torture himself over that awful thing his third grade teacher said to him once. He'll dig into his bag of go-to bitter lozenges to find some way to ballast his happiness.

Let his glass remain empty for a moment or two, and he’ll find it even easier to reframe himself into Hell. There are myriad routes to misery when non-delight parses as persecution.

I asked ChatGPT to proofread, and noted that that final sentence was a modern take on the Hsin Hsin Ming (aka Verses on the Faith Mind by The 3rd Zen Patriarch, Sengstau).

It agreed, noting that my version is "more culturally fluent in neurosis." I was, it decided, offering "Secular Zen with Bourgeois Teeth," which I said I'd use when people ask me what I write about ("Oh, you know, secular Zen with bourgeois teeth, etc.")

The chatbot suggested tagging on "also: tacos" for a complete description of what I do.

I couldn't argue.

Coaxing Reframing

Me: The food here is often salty.

Waiter: I've never heard that before.

Me: That's the last time you can say that!


It wasn’t just a sly comeback. His world shifted (very slightly) when I gave my feedback—but he didn’t notice.

The follow-up made him register it. And registration is everything.

Acceptance is Not Approval

I learned an important lesson one week when I had a cookie at 2pm on Monday, a cookie at 2pm on Tuesday, and, at 2pm on Wednesday, experienced an overwhelming physical urge for a cookie. Like I was being pushed into it.

This was both highly interesting and incredibly unsurprising. Our minds and bodies are usually just trying to oblige us, based on patterns of behavior or of attention-paying. It's just like TikTok showing us lots of squirrel videos because that's what we've previously clicked on. The mind functions as an algorithm, surfacing whatever has sparked interest. And it even thoughtfully factors in your scheduling patterns.

So it wasn't my body dragging me along, trying to satisfy its base yearnings. My body is not my oppressor, but more like an eager poodle taught to expect a walk every morning. I trained it that way, and can just as easily train it some other way. This is a whole other way to think about habits—a far more helpful framing than the standard talk of discipline and self-denial.

It's the same with suffering and grieving.

If the memory of your dear deceased parakeet Henry keeps popping up, it's not your mind dragging you through a painful process of grieving. It's that you've devoted lots of recent attention to Henry, so the "algorithm" (so to speak) keeps offering heart-wrenching trips through the The Sad Tale of Henry, and if you keep opting in, soon every icon on your mental screen will be some slant or other on that theme.

Henry isn't calling to you from your imagination any more than the cookies are. You've established a pattern of focusing attention, so your mind keeps offering more of same. Just like TikTok offering squirrel videos.

There's one big problem. We are convinced, as a society, that we need to think about bad stuff a lot, because if we gloss over it, the very worst thing might happen: REPRESSION. We obsess over loss and tragedy because we've been told it's a long, arduous process. It has filtered down from the mountaintops of psychotherapy that we must "accept" before we can move on.

Here's where we screw this up (tremendously): "Accept" doesn't mean "approve". We have developed a societal habit of waiting for a feeling of approval, which will never arrive, because Henry was a hell of a parakeet, so we'll naturally always be sad. How have we managed to convince ourselves that we must approve of misfortune? Talk about being set up for failure!

Humans don't require optimal conditions and unblemished delight for proper functioning. In fact, we're built for loss. Not to approve of it, but to accept it and move on. The hazards of repression arise when we neurotically deny loss, death, failure, etc. We might hover in foggy denial, or seal off the thought. In such instances, we need to take time to really think things through. That's the "acceptance" threshold, and it's a low bar!

Over-grieving invites perils more daunting than dreaded repression. What's worse, after all, than getting caught in a vicious circle of obsessive misery?

If you know what happened, and clearly acknowledge what happened, and some sort of emotional response has landed, then you've accepted. You are free to move on...unless you’re attached to sad stories (probably to ballast your happiness).

There is no shortage of sad stories to grab at. Me, I'll never play with the NY Knicks, and the only reason I'm not weeping as I type that is because I've opted out of marination in the lament. I haven't made my life revolve around it, becoming That Guy With The Dashed Basketball Dreams. Oh, and don't get me started on the woman in the green crushed velvet dress with whom I exchanged soulful glances in 1992 but was too shy to follow up with. Having opted out of freezing attention on sad tales, they don't often pop up on my mental dashboard.

Not repression. Having accepted, I declined perpetual marination. 

Modern grievers keep endlessly running the scenario ("My beloved parakeet has been forever silenced!"), hoping to reach an approval point where it no longer makes them sad. But that's not how it works. You're just training the algorithm. And as you train, so shall you reap.

Notes: 

1. We grieve very differently than people in previous centuries. It's partially because they were tougher. But I think it's also because this terrible misunderstanding of "acceptance" went viral in the mid 20th century after the rise of psychotherapy, which scared us about "repression" to the point where we make ourselves miserable waiting for an impossible level of approval that was never the benchmark (i.e. loss never comes to feel terrific...and that's okay).

2. Contemporary psychotherapists seem to share the misapprehension, and urge an overzealous and unrealistic notion of "acceptance". They've lost the thread.

3. This comes at a moment when we are more entitled than ever. We feel we deserve an unblemished world experience, and are like princesses increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas. The terror of "repression", which drives compulsive over-marination re: shortfall, is a particularly toxic addition to our psychic landscape.

4. More on how "Your Body's Just Trying to Accommodate You"

See also Grief Survival Kit

Gas

Fill your car up with gas.


Situational Awareness

Should

"Pedestrians should use this route" (the working sidewalk across the street).

Not "must", like everywhere else. Should.

Miniscule cultural differences are the important cultural differences.

This message is brought to you by the First Church of Nano-Aesthetics.