You know that feeling of joy you get when you learn a new word that perfectly describes a feeling you couldn’t put your finger on? Like the first time I heard “schadenfreude” – pleasure at the misfortune of others – and thought Aha! There’s the explanation for the popularity of JackAss and Funniest Home Videos.
I had one of those moments recently and felt like a complete fool for not clueing in earlier.
When I was in highschool I read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It was very Socratic, but I was 13 or 14 and Socrates was just the name of some dead Greek who talked a lot and said Some Things. Regardless, the book resonated with me. It is, in essence, a look at man as a part of a whole, and not the pinnacle of biological evolution. It looked at our culture as flawed and only one of many alternatives; it compared us to “primitive” cultures – mostly nomadic ones – and put forward the idea that these cultures had as much value as our own. It drew a connect-the-dots line from man before-the-advent-of-agriculture to today, and how this fundamental change enacted a ripple effect that was still shaking the ground on which we stood.
I’m most probably remembering it through rose coloured glasses (I should really go back and read it again) but the fact is that it had a profound effect on teenage me. Disillusioned, bored and impressionable teenage me who was out there reading books on the sustainability of society instead of putting on make-up and going to sock-hops. I’m 30 and still can’t put on mascara if my life depended on it. That’s a rant for another day.
Years later I would read Sex At Dawn and a guitar string somewhere in the universe would resonate with the same tone I heard when I had read Ishmael. The connect-the-dots picture would become larger. Years later still, I would inadvertently stumble upon the fact that Sex At Dawn author Christopher Ryan is doing podcasts now after hearing him on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Oh what a tangled web…
This is becoming a much longer story than it needs to be. My partner-in-crime has taken to mocking me for getting older, since it seems with every year I gain the length of my stories increase exponentially and The Point gets further and further away.
I’d been independently playing with ideas sparked by Ishmael and then fed by Sex At Dawn, Darwin and Mendel, and a slew of psychology classes. In another life I probably would have pursued the shit out of these ideas, but life had other plans that included not having a steady home or income or idea of what the fuck I was doing. So instead these thoughts just hovered around in the back of my head until I fell down the rabbit hole of podcasts and began listening to Christopher Ryan’s Tangentially Speaking. Then bam, it all came flooding back with the discovery that these ideas already existed and more than that, there was a whole field out there built by other folks who were warming themselves by the same damn fire that I’d been playing with since I was 13. Evolutionary Psychology. That’s the point.
Anyway, you folks in the internet probably don’t care about any of this. I imagine that it sounds like me saying, “Look guys, did you know you could put bits of plants into hot water and it taste great?!” While the whole world looks on and says, “That’s called tea, you fucker.” Hey, tea is delicious, and so is finding ideas and theories and conversations that tickle the imagination. And there’s nothing wrong with a good tickle.
Now excuse me while I lose myself in a frenzy of tea drinking and reading.
