A story which immediately devolves into a complicated ramble on the nature of affiliations

In my recent attempts to be a civilized human being and interact with others, I noticed a few things, one of which conspired with my brain to compose a contrived ranting on the subject.

I don't like concerts. This is not to say that I disapprove of other people's enjoyment in them or hearing their tales of jubilation or disappointment. This is a separate issue from the concept of concerts themselves that I'll get around to eventually. It occurred to me that I've been to maybe two, and both at someone else's request. My own enjoyment of music is not improved by being surrounded by other people, some in various states of inebriation or undress, others having a jolly good time in a more general sense. My own emotional reactions to music are more private. They're not something that makes me want to get out and yell or dance, to observe others doing so, or much of anything else relating to public musical appreciation.

When this first occurred to me I hadn't gone through CYOE yet. But basically Cowen eventually explains that most of our social or cultural preferences, especially in a modern environment with lots of choices, are effectively public things that we share in and experience with others. I don't work that way, at least not very well. I have found that exposure to other people's preferences of something like music will have an influence in that I might find some of what they listen to worthwhile for my own tastes. I'd imagine virtually all of my post-2000 musical tastes emerged from other people's listening habits. I have also found that I filter my movie attendance based on the relative public merits, as expressed by imdb or metacritic, of a borderline movie to attend or see. But these were still private habits at the core. I didn't go around asking people what they were listening to or what concerts they were going to. In most cases I found I didn't care, which seems perfectly sensible to me. Very few people I have enough of a society with to be in the same place while they listen to their own musical tastes and to where that would be a real problem for me in the sense that I could not tolerate their varieties of experiences. I also found that people asking me what I listened to was something of an annoying question. I'm wasn't sure what it was supposed to demonstrate about me by learning these bits of information.

What finally occurred to me is that this probably a less than sensible way to approach the problem. Most of my preferences in culture were developed privately and individually. They are, in most cases, my own. Certainly more so than with others whose musical or movie interests developed alongside and in combination with friends and family. As a result if I were to actually examine any logic or rationale for why I liked one particular style over another, a particular artist over another, et al, there might be something someone could learn about how I think, what I like to think about, and so on.

This is not generally what people think they are asking me when they ask questions like that however. (Similar to "how's your day"?). It's sort of a less meaningful question, a selfish one at that. People are in fact trying to validate their opinions or interests by having associates who share them. I'm not sure there's anything wholly wrong with that. I certainly prefer being able to talk about basketball, philosophy, politics, or military history once in a while myself. And filtering out people who listen extensively to country music does seem to be a decent proxy for at least removing excessive and trite conversations on NASCAR or UFC instead of the NBA or the Final Four, or political opinions that include killing ragheads instead of actually examining the root issues of terrorism and stopping it at its core (another post for another day relating to the ability of Americans to slap "freedom" on something as though it's impossible to be a false argument or product behind it). Still I'm not sure that they're always curious about the other person's real response when they ask this sort of question. They're usually looking for an affirmation of their own responses. That has its uses of course for a discerning individual with fussy tastes. More shared interests means more opportunities for future discussions and activities. Someone who does not have an abiding love for 1920s jazz music probably will not want to hear much on that topic from someone who does. But they might still have other interests to collaborate. Unfortunately as it regards the average person, it does not appear that they're even interested in that much investigation. Most people, in my experience, like to hear themselves talk and hear their opinions or views repeated back to them. And they don't want people with divergent opinions talking to them.

I am myself in some ways guilty of this by trying to use persuasive and passive forms of arguments over matters political and economic. CYOE basically glazed over this as a problem as it relates to politics. With more and more resources available to access new information and experiences, most people do not choose different experiences. They instead choose to remain in comfortable spaces. As this relates to important matters such as news and journalism, people can now select with greater ability things which cater to their specific worldviews and do not challenge this zone with any dissonant facts or reporting. Since most of us have such cognitive biases on some level, it's not like we're all innocent and live in a world with a true free flow and exchange of ideas, and that ideal probably won't come to pass anytime soon. Still, I can't recall that we ever had quite so many people who listened only to their own prevailing conceptions and never stopped living in an echo chamber. Perhaps that's merely a glimmer of hopeful nostalgia. But I do think the technology is playing an active role in reshaping the nature and game of political discourse. It's moving a lot faster among "normal" people, first thanks to newspapers, then radio, then TV, and now Drudge and Huffington Post. To be frank, modern political issues are generally so complex that I could usually care less what "normal people" mobilize over and care about. Even where they might have raised a cogent issue they don't seem to have any reasons to have come to that perspective. There's no intellectual curiosity surrounding an issue and the time constraints over having many, many issues conflicting in our daily lives makes that near to impossible to begin with. I barely care what I think on some matters that seem of great importance to others (immigration or health care for instance). And I have lots of time to ruminate on such meaningless prattle.

Getting back to the story. I think about personal preferences a great deal and often wonder why people like the things they do. Generally I think it comes down to some sort of memory response that something triggers. It reminds them of X, and X was good or felt good. People like a song because they danced to at their wedding. They like a sport because they played as a child or their father/grandfather took them to a game and explained it to them. Things like this. Those are really social explanations that bring up the neurological responses somewhere along the way. I could certainly do more basic research in real psychology and figure this out in a scientific explanation from people who did any actual research and I probably should (when I get done studying homo economicus perhaps). The reason, as it seems to me, is that I prefer less social means of expression, argumentation, and experience. Those few actual joys I take in something are either intensely personal or intensely intellectual. The reward part of my brain is kicked into high gear by looking into something and learning about it or thinking about it and ordering it in my memory and understanding.

That sort of joy is pretty common, but not really to any sense of the extremes that I seem to have. I thought about this too. I don't think or know if I have some actual mental disorder or problem, though I certainly have some practical problems relating to mental states and social interactions (particularly anything deemed romantic or metaphorical). It should instead be pretty clear that I often think more intensely, at greater length, and with more details than most people. And it would then be a safe assumption that this has all sorts of effects on things like how I encounter others, how often, what I discuss with them (or listen intently to), how well I think my own interactions, or lack thereof, to have gone (to be fair I don't worry about offending or impressing people with much of what is deemed important or polite company either), and the simplistic attitude I have toward emotional or irrational responses to other people's problems. I recall in high school I was lauded by a fellow student for appearing disinterested and not being emotionally distressed by the process of earning grades. I generally mock people who took seriously the sort of rat race of academic achievement rather than those who did so more by the curious accident of being intelligent and having the same interests in academics as the school they attended. The "look at me" symbolism of such things has never appealed to me as much as real academic study, education qua education. A teacher likewise once praised my ability to concentrate on issues that I was actually interested in (while generally muddling through academic obstacles placed before that goal).

That these can be difficult questions at times that appeal to my mind's eye is sometimes troubling to me. For one, it limits the amount of feedback I get on the value of my productions. Most people will be either of a limited means or have limited information at hand to process and (hopefully at times) disagree meaningfully if needs be. I have only a vague sense that some people will find what I compose as a consequence of my thought experiments and investigations on issues meaningful, interesting, or even important as a consequence. For another it often limits other experiences of a more basic nature. I think I used to find more passive reception of joy or inner peace just walking through a wooded valley, listening to music, reading a book, or attending a ballgame. It has become difficult to focus on the moment and crowd out the constant yammering of my mind and its intent points of local interest while it makes often pointless connections between the scene in front of me and something else entirely. Sure I'm contemplating important issues that need a rational moderator between heavily polarized people not even possessing the same facts before arriving at distinct ideological or religious perspective and biases. But isn't a sunset (or a sunrise more commonly for me) still pretty sometimes? Or a pick and roll defense still hard to do?

I'm also somewhat perplexed that the extent of my pleasures is becoming defined by the existence of other people, though largely in the abstract sense rather than the physical. One of the apparently more difficult constructs of Plato's Republic is notion of forms. Forms were basically perfect ideas to which all things in nature were images of. So a chair is a concept and then a physical object which resembles it is thus a chair in our idealized minds. Now there are many philosophical objections to that notion, but it's an old and uncomplicated assertion about the nature of the universe and one that anyone familiar with the subject of philosophy will encounter. It occurs to me that many of our interactions can be based on a sort of forms relationship. That is, that we're happy in principle or the abstract about something, but the actual experience wasn't perfect in the same way and intense reflection revealing that there's a source for discontent. The idea of traveling to Europe appealing more than actually doing so. Sexual fantasy drowning out real life for some. Essentially that our idealized glory in experiencing something was where the joy comes from and not from the experience itself.

The source of that discontent isn't really the external stimuli however, at least not usually. And at least not in my case, though I've noticed it's pretty common for most people to externalize problems rather than try to look at them. Lower expectations for movies as entertainment tends to make some of them seem like better or thoughtful experiences. But does this mean the movie was actually good or we made a perception of expectations that made it seem good? This is a sort of a chicken or the egg problem endemic to philosophical pondering. So it's worth wondering from time to time, for me at least, whether if something was at fault if it was in fact my own damn fault. If I come away from an encounter with other human beings with the impression that I did not act properly or did not impress upon them myself in any sensible way, this would seem most likely to be my fault. But it does not generally occur in reality that other people perceive my actions toward them to be difficult or insensible (except in cases where I know myself to be deliberately difficult, such as with true imbeciles). Weird maybe. But that's about as far as their perceptions have extended. It's always possible that people are dishonest about this. Or that my form of perception for myself gives me some idealized notion of what I should be and how I should act that isn't quite real to begin with and isn't supposed to be. But neither option is true enough to provide real guidance on how to act in the first place in social settings. Particularly social settings where I have little shared experience to contribute with. Like concerts. I might want to find myself at a symphony hall (if they'll let me in with flip-flops and khakis), but I'm not one to actually find much enjoyment in the experience of modern concerts. This, generally, isn't limited in scope to the problems of musical tastes and affliations. My sporting interests are intensely analytical, save for some modest attachments to particular players (Kevin Garnett for example) and parts of the Illinois sports scene (Cubs and Illini), and this gives me little to debate passionately with others when such subjects come up.

Perhaps it's enough for me to vicariously observe the proceedings and digressions of others. It seems to be usually sufficient. But occasionally in the aftermath of such things it seems that I could have interjected more often or made some more useful contribution to a social event and that I might even have benefited by doing so. It still takes a very long time for that to happen. I have no problems with authority or barriers to discourse (sex, religion, politics, and money, the usual taboos, are all on the table). And so I will very easily discuss with strangers, even superiors in some sense, in written or spoken formats topics that they either cannot or do not often discuss themselves. But I often do not get around to actually mentioning my own idea for a long time, instead mulling the merits or demerits of their contentions and debating in a practice of sophistry without a clear delineation of my own stance.

I'm not sure if that's a filtering problem to determine if I can actually talk to another person and find the experience worthwhile. Or if I'm just not sure I want to take the time and effort to think them over. Or if I'm just aware that I have really deep thoughts by the standards of other people.