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!"
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!!!").From "Exiting the Skinner Box"
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.
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.
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: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":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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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