Simplicity Machine
Airport Workers, Charging Bears, and Interracial Marriage.
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Now to today’s piece 🤝
You and your buddies are hanging out at the park when you mention your longtime friend, Joseph, is dropping by to meet up. Your housemate Henry says, “Oh yeah? I look forward to meeting with him.”
Joseph arrives; “Hey what’s up y’all!”. You pull him into a bear hug. “Hey Henry, this is Joseph. Joseph, Henry.” “Good to meet you,” says Henry, giving him a one-arm hug.
“Nice to meet ya too my guy! Haha, never thought I’d meet someone with such bad taste!” says Joseph giggling, pointing at the mismatched Hawaiian shirt Henry’s got on. “Yeah man, my mom gave it to me before she passed,” Henry replies dryly. “Ah well, at least now you got her bad taste with you!” Joseph replies.
Now, you know Joseph is actually a light-hearted dude that gets super nervous around new people and jokes are his way to make himself & the people around him at ease.
But Henry doesn’t know that.
“Whatever man.” Henry walks off, pissed at Joseph for making fun of him. “Yeesh, that guy can’t take a joke…” Joseph mutters nervously.
Over dinner, Henry says, “Dude, your buddy Joseph’s a complete asshole.” You pipe up, “No man, I promise he just gets nervous in front of other people and tries to be funny to keep things light. It’s just his anxiety about meeting new people. He really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings with what he said about your shirt; give him a chance.”
Henry, out of respect for your friendship, begrudgingly agrees.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, at a house party, you overhear peals of laughter coming from across the room. Both Henry & Joseph are doubling over, each other’s arm clapping the other’s back, over a joke they just told together.
Shit, I guess they’re vibing.
Later, you & Henry dip out of the party to grab some late-night eats & stop by a Chick-Fil-A drive-thru. “What’s your order?” asks the drive-thru server. “I’ll take a chicken sandwich. Henry, what do you want?” Henry responds, “Yeah I’ll take one too. Oh, shit I forgot to ask Joseph for his order. Hold up, let me call him.”
"Hello? What’s your order?” asks the drive-thru server a bit irritated this time. “Uh, yeah, sorry one sec. My buddy’s figuring out his order,” you reply back.
“How do you not know your order? You had all this time to think of an order and you still don’t have one?!, shouts back the drive-thru server angrily.
”Uh, one sec!” you reply back as you nervously look at Henry. Henry shakes his head and shows you his phone; the call went to voicemail & Joseph hasn’t responded to the texts. Shit. “You had 10 minutes in line to check the site and think of an order!” says the drive-thru server. “Ok, ok. We’ll take 3 chicken sandwiches,” you respond.
As you pull up to the window to pick up the order, Henry says, ”What an asshole, yeah?” You shrug, say nothing but silently agree. Yeah, that guy could’ve been nicer.
What’s the difference between Joseph and the drive-thru server?
The difference is that Henry and Joseph had the opportunity to get to know each other better and see each other beyond their initial first impressions. They experienced each other’s multifaceted nature.
For the drive-thru server, your collective experience of him was one-dimensional: his frustration with fulfilling the role of selling fast food.
But maybe he’s not always like that. Maybe you were the 300th customer of his shift who didn’t know their order and he’s had to sit there all day listening to “Um”s and “Uh”’s and “one sec”’s.
Maybe he’s dealing with a slew of overdue bills at home and working overtime to make ends meet. Maybe he’s looking forward to the end of his shift so he can rush home to a sick daughter. Maybe he’s a dedicated son who decided to live at home to take care of his aging mother or who stops at a crosswalk to walk an old lady across a busy street.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive.
This is Water - David Foster Wallace
But thinking about the multifaceted sides of a person requires nuance and distinguishing between various shades of grey across a spectrum from white to black.
Though people are multi-faceted, our minds easily define others on single facets.
Why is that? This is because while people are multi-faceted, our ancient minds are not adapted for multi-facety.
Simply put, multi-facety takes up energy. In a world where every being is fighting for survival, our minds love, I mean f**king love simplicity. Is the thing in front of me dangerous? Is it something that could provide shelter? Food? Sex?
And there’s a fairly good reason for this bias towards simplicity. If a bear is charging at you, and you are sitting there contemplating the complexities of bear society & how the bear’s upbringing genuinely affected its mental state, and whether that’s a real reason for this bear to be charging at you with intent to kill (or if it’s just bluffing), the likelihood of you passing down your genes is minimal.
Over time, though, those of our ancestors that became better at making complex tools emerged, and developing complex thought began an evolutionary advantage. Our brains grew larger and more complex. We began building more intricate systems to organize ourselves, known as civilization.1
And somewhere, along the way, the scenarios of bears charging at us evaporated to the fringes of our lives. These encounters are usually exceptions in people’s lives, not the day-to-day. We never lost our primitive abilities but we gained cognitive abilities atop it.
And so our minds, on default, are these constant sorting machines; identifying the worlds around us for what’s useful for us, what’s not useful, and what’s dangerous. Out of this arises a simplicity generation machine.
This default software in our heads encourages us to unconsciously capture one thing that defines a person and what that thing is depends on both the time in history and the context of the encounter.
In 1950s America, a time when the vast majority of Americans disagreed with interracial marriage, the defining heuristic was race. Any headline, situation, or complex human being involved in any situation could be distinguished by race.
Simply attaching the notion of race to any headline would drastically affect how others interpret the event and some argue that this perception, in a different, more subtle manner, is pervasive today.
Today, upon encountering a disheveled man in the street, you may initially consider multiple things about them.
But wait a moment, dig a little deeper. What facets are being missed from that observation? What are the questions that we are not asking? The ones that we have not seen as being applicable?
Wow. There’s a lot more, maybe more than you’d have thought to have considered initially.
I am reminded of the complexity that lies in distilling who someone is into neat containers by this man.
On the first appearance, what were the top 5 impressions you had of him? Note it down and then read further.
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The man above is Spanky, the SFO-airport-baggage handler-former-Filipino-rockstar.2
After becoming a major hit in the Philippines as the founding member of the late 1970s Manila-sound band VST, Spanky left the upper crust of Philippine society, a life of wealth & fame, to start a new life in the Bay Area in Vallejo, California, with his wife & children. He went from singing in front of thousands, performing for Filipino dictator Marcos in Malacañang Palace to scrubbing plates in the kitchens of SFO airport.
Upon first sight what did you think about him? Immigrant, maybe? Filipino if you could guess his ethnicity? Airport worker from the United cap he had on?
Did rockstar, fame, and wealth ever cross your mind?
For most of us, no.
The easier someone falls into a predefined category, the easier it is to remain indifferent.
It’s harder to be intrinsically curious about the people we can easily define (such as those close to us) as we relate to them in a certain way.
This is why continually learning and expanding our worlds even after formal education ends is so vitally important. How we do this can vary, from books to volunteering in homeless shelters, to lectures to spending time with people who question/challenge our beliefs, to informational documentaries and videos.
Each of these mediums, in its own way, expands your sense of the world and allows you to better understand the people before you.
Then you can better view people within the relative context that you already know.
Or place your existing context within a larger context.
Stay curious, my friends.
-Kiran
If you like this, check out Sabrina’s NotSoGlamorous.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
Another great reason to start writing online.
Coronation of Ronald McDonald thanks to Midjourney AI
“She would always be here, she would never leave. Nothing left to fear.” from Melody Song’s first piece on her Substack Mellowed Out. Incredible writing.