Interested in Interesting

I find humans as a whole fascinating. When it comes to individual humans, the only ones I find interesting are the real ones.

What is a “real” human, you ask? Well, that’s different for everyone, because everyone has a different frame of reference, but the criteria are the same: real people exist in your real life.

When I think about “humanity,” I’m thinking about the emergent properties of how people will react en masse to things. When thinking about that, individual humans are rarely good data – each human is an anecdote, after all. So if a public figure, someone who exists to me only on a screen, does something weird then I’m rarely curious. They have their reasons, and I’m probably not going to figure them out. But more importantly, I don’t care – that person’s life doesn’t affect me, we don’t know each other, I can’t do anything to influence them. They aren’t real – to me.

Now, an individual in my actual life – the principal of my child’s school, a professional colleague, the owner of a store I like – these people are interesting to me, despite being individuals. I care about their lives, and their lives intertwine with me. I have the motivation to understand how they as individuals “work,” even if that provides no greater insight into humanity as a whole. The principal of my child’s school could be a total outlier on the Bell curves of many psychological profiles, but knowing their unique brain better might provide more benefit to me and my family than knowing more about the general cases.

A celebrity, political figure, or athlete doesn’t hold that same interest for me. And when I see other people feverishly discussing a person like that – someone who might as well be a fictional character in terms of actual impact on their lives – I often find myself feeling very distant from that part of humanity’s day-to-day.

The lesson, I think: strive to know your neighbors very well, and strive to know the eddies and currents of humanity as well as you need. But pay no attention to those men and women behind the curtain. If you must be on any side of gossip, better to be the person gossiped about than the person spilling the tea. At least then you’re probably doing something interesting.