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Meditations on Internet, Driving, Flavoring of the Crowd
My parents don't like the way I scavenge. They don't appreciate that kind of cunning, and it's probably for different reasons. My mother just thinks it's lowly and improper, but my father probably appreciates it on some deep level, but agrees with my mother.
Oh! Maybe I should explain. My apartment hasn't had internet since I moved into it, and I've been using the university's library's student internet to access any. If you've seen the South Park episode which parodies The Grapes of Wrath, I was starting to talk in a similar way: "There's mighty fine internet in this here aisle," "Ahh, we getting good internet here. Internet we can live on," "The Internet's dried up. There's nowhere else to go." This anarchic system bothered me, but only about as much as anything else bothers me.
It's weird, but adopting a taoist/stoic outlook (and they are pretty similar) does terrible things to you. You learn/condition yourself into laying back and observing, occasionally interacting, and when you try to force something you come into greater and greater conflict. I'll take driving as an example. If, for one reason or another, I'm pressed for time in driving between Wilmington and Raleigh, I'll go very fast and encounter more drivers that piss me off. If, however, I have no issue and drive normally, I have almost no problems at all with other drivers, instead empathizing or taking pity in some cases. Yes, pity, I pity other drivers their inability to drive correctly, it's almost too self-righteous and horrifying to think about. I like to think it's a very minor pity.
Driving tangent aside, the adaptability of the human mind is astounding, its response to context especially. The internet-less apartment is one such example, but another is any sort of social gathering and the change of mood, no, not mood, state of being. Aristotle had a word for this in Greek which eludes me at the moment, but it goes farther than just what "mood" would suggest. Around different people, a person begins to think differently in line with the other person's presence. This change is far more profound than some realize. If you've never noticed, I only seem to be around if there are two others, and when confined to just interacting with one person I become quite non-committal (or maybe I just ask a bunch of questions). This is because I learned this change of mood very young when I had two different friends over one day, and in the midst of the meeting I was very confused. I didn't know how to act because I behaved very differently around the two. Sure, there was a baseline of behavior I adhered to, but that meeting showed me the baseline was very small, mostly limited to societal conventions (though my eight-year-old self couldn't have told you it was that).
I propose this is nothing new or insightful to consider, and there's even a maxim for it already, but you begin to act a bit like the person you're around. Interact with them enough, and you start copying their habits and their mannerisms. You develop formulaic conversational responses, you select a very fine idiolect based on what you perceive to like or find clever. (Side question: is it condescending that I linked the word's definition?) The mystifying thing about this process is as you loan fragments of personality from one person, they are also loaning fragments as well, doing the exact same thing.
I've found this process at once far more difficult to engage in in a group setting, and also far easier. In a group setting, there is collective judgment undertaken, and especially with self-recursive/aware trends abounding people love to comment about it, having their own meta-conversations (I do it all the time on this very blurty). This makes fragments harder to adopt just because they are being critiqued by a group (ooh peer pressure) and possibly even analyzed openly. On the other hand a group becomes closer over time, and that allows certain fragments to spread easier.
So, if my hermitage disturbs you, it's because I pride myself on being keenly aware of these effects, and there is something to be said for solitude in doses.
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