I never quite got used to this whole human thing. I don’t think I had the proper training, or the right education, and now I’m not sure about even the most basic things. What am I supposed to do, what should I say? Am I standing with the right posture, or am I standing out from ignorance of some convention? Psychology has a lot to say about norms – acceptable standards of conduct within the group – but none of us ever get a list of what they are, or why they’re expected. I guess most people don’t have trouble with it. You can watch other people and imitate their behavior, and it becomes a kind of self-reinforcing vessel to constrain all these animals who otherwise might be running amok and starting trouble. Are human beings born with an innate understanding of their social nature? How to talk about their experiences and the world they inhabit, in a human way? What even is a human way of doing anything – what is human?
I must not be from this world. Everything is always so strange here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBCMrPrBB34
A conversation between two androids in a Ridley Scott movie went like this:
Android A) When you close your eyes, do you dream of me?
Android B) I don’t dream at all.
Android A) No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.
Are you Android A or Android B? We’re all just facsimiles of the lessons we learned in daycare, and our teachers can’t be held responsible for what they didn’t notice we were learning. I learned how to hide inside blocks and toys, and how to divert everybody’s attention to safe, neutral things. You don’t have to worry about getting to know, or being known by someone else so long as you have a puzzle to solve. All the good will in the world won’t close that gap. It’s resting above a darkened abyss, and nobody knows what lies at the bottom of it but me.
8 comments
I get that too, but I tend to try to shove thoughts like that out of my mind, because thinking about how I’m acting makes me feel weirder
That’s the traditional impulse, I think. I don’t do well with impulses. I see the impulse, but it’s pushing me towards nowhere. If I’m just acting without thinking, I’m not talking, I’m focusing on a task or a process. I have no auto-pilot for navigating human beings.
I can’t say I had the early socialization of daycare.. or the first couple years of school as I was a homeschooled kid. My classmate was the same kid I shared a room and bathed with.
Human nature has never been nature to me, either, Rivets. I can assume I was placed on this planet as a twisted experiment gone horribly wrong. With that said, the information we lack with the handbook none of us received must have been lost somewhere in the Postal system.. that or there was government intervention to prevent us from being able to assimilate.
As for which Android I would be, I have to say neither.. I would be more like Data of Star Trek’s TNG. There is a curiosity in me for information on humans but no actual desire to be one. Humans are irrational and illogical.
Have never understood it either.
‘why should i do that?’
‘what is the purpose of this behavior?’
‘oh this motion implies this sub-meaning’
‘he does this to hide this internal emotion’
‘he has trained himself in this way for this purpose’
I hate rhetoric. Or when people try to convince me of something. But i’m probably to literal and blunt.
There’s nothing that needs convincing. There’s no meaning or purpose behind any of it – most people don’t seem to think about what they’re doing enough for that. And when they do think about it, it results in anxiety for some reason. We’re all insane in this big human family.
No, most people don’t think in General, let alone think about their actions. We, the suicidal portion of humans, seem to be excluded from the masses of lemming-like society because we DO ask “why?”. Unlike most humans who are contented to be living according to their consumer driven lives, never questioning media, society, convention etc..
I came to realize that it requires intelligence to be suicidal.. stupid people are happy people- why? because they are far too idiotic to see the folly in the world. Kudos to us.
Well put SleeplessMind, well put.
Reminds me of another Maynard song (weirdly jivey tonight);
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys; Give them thumbs, they make a club and beat their brother down
How they’ve survived so misguided is a mystery
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
To lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here