Daily Archives: September 18, 2014

I don’t wanna play

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As you all know, I have been pondering my lonely childhood lately (well, more so than usual, anyhow) and I believe that I have reached another signpost along the path towards solving the puzzle that is myself, and I figure it is time that I wrote down my conclusions before setting off for the next one.

Specifically, I have been wondering just why none of those attempts by other kids to befriend me…. took. They tried, they really did. But I just walked away. And what makes that worse is that nearly all of them were people on the fringe just like myself, kids stuck on the outside looking in, and still, I rejected them.

Why? Why did I do that? I can’t help but think the answer to that question will be very important for my recovery. So what was wrong with me that I couldn’t be reached at all?

I think I have the answer now. The reason nobody could befriend me was that I did not want to change. I have always been very strongly an individual and extremely stubborn, and that kept me from making the changes to myself that would have been required for me to learn to get along with my fellow kids and, as it were, meet them half way.

It’s not that I wasn’t trying. I was desperately lonely and really wanted a friend, someone I could have fun with and not be so alone. It’s not like I rejected these kids right away when they tried to befriend me. I tried to connected with them. But I lacked that vital bit of social IQ that tells you that you have to let a relationship change you in order to let it in.

And sure, there were unusually big obstacles. I had a lot of trouble relating to my peers because I just was not like them, especially in the first (and worst) four years of elementary school. The gap between me and them was far wider than with any two average kids. I had a much longer distance to bridge.

But still, I look back to then and I wonder just what was wrong with me. Would it have been that huge a sacrifice of self to let down my guard and join my fellow kids in their world? Sure, it might not have been as mentally stimulating as I liked, but I might nevertheless have learned a hell of a lot more about life that way.

But I was too ignorant to know that there were things I did not know, let alone to understand that there was a way I could learn it. I was so frozen inside and timid and shy that I did not even grasp that there was such a thing as a social world. My isolated life was all I had ever known. All my socializing had come through my siblings, and that was (I think) the vital ingredient that kept me from ending up yet another victim of Asperger’s Syndrone. That, and a few key teachers who hung in there long enough to relate to me at least a little.

Tragically, though, deep down I just plain did not “get it”. I earnestly wanted to get along, have friends, not have to be afraid of my fellow students any more, and basically be a real kid. But like I have said before, the idea of actively trying to fit in, of looking at what the other kids do and doing that, never occurred to me.

After all, why should I do what they do when what they do seems stupid and boring and pointless to me?

Seems like a logical enough statement… but pure logic is always in peril of falling into error because of that which the logician does not comprehend. There’s actually a million reasons I should have opened up to my fellow students and done what they did. I could have accelerated my own social development by leaps and bounds just by unbending enough to at least pretend to be a more normal sort of kid.

Answers can be logical, reasonable, plausible, and sensible, and still be completely and utterly wrong. If you expect everything to be logical and reject all that is not, you risk being trapped in your own ignorance.

Some people know and understand a lot more than you, but you will never learn from them if you never let them in. The adults around me as a kid, and even my fellow kids, might not have been as bright as me but that does not mean I could not have learned a hell of a lot from them, especially socially.

Intelligence is not omniscience, after all, no matter how smart you are.

Then, when I did finally get good friends in college, they were all socially defective nerds like me, so there was no chance of me learning what I needed to know from them.

If anything, I tended to have a slightly higher social IQ than them, which is a lot like being the tallest among pygmies.

So I was – and still am – trapped in my own frozen little bubble. Feeling like I am every so smart and that I know, see, and understand so much more than others. Even showing off my psychological insight and acumen, as if understanding people like they are bugs under glass or animals at a zoo is any kind of substitute for true human understanding.

Being a humanist does not make one human. I can understand how other people tick with extraordinary depth and clarity, but that doesn’t do me a bit of good when I am alone in a room full of strangers. My professors told me I had an extraordinary level of psychological insight and understanding, not to mention compassion, and yet I am still a lonely, frozen planet shooting through the interstellar void.

I could be your therapist. But I can’t be my own.

I hate these weeks with no therapy appointment.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Are you an intellectual?

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We intellectuals are a strange breed, and one of our foremost peculiarities is a tendency for neurotic self-doubt. Our restlessly inquisitive minds lead us to vistas unknown and give us wizard-like powers in the mental realm, but the other edge on that blade is that it leads us to doubt things that nobody else would even think of doubting.

One of those is whether or not we really are smart. The lack of relationship between intelligence and effectiveness in the world often leads us to question how smart we can be when we seem to have the damnedest time actually getting anything done, and the commonest solution to this conflict is to doubt whether we really are all that bright after all.

Smart is as smart does, after all.

In order to aid my fellow eggheads in their efforts to solve this problem by providing a more satisfactory way to measure one’s fitness for membership in the worldwide league of intellectuals, below you will find a list of some of the common characteristics I have observed while traveling in above-average IQ circles, and if you truly are one of us, I hope that you will find them comforting and reassuring.

As long as the following apply to you, you are an intellectual.

1. Intellectuals have a great deal of mental energy

Of all the common traits of intellectuals, the most defining is their abundance of mental energy. This surplus of mental energy is at the core of what it means to be an intellectual, and drives the rest of the characteristics that we will be discussing today. Deep inside the psyche of every intellectual, it is as if a switch had been thrown that diverts the lion’s share of bodily energies to the mental as opposed to the physical processes of the human body. This inherent prioritization automatically leads to a great deal of mental energy being produced, and whether it is expresses as a manic mental running and leaping about, or something more like a vast and stately mansion of the mind, it is this abundance that underlies it all.

This leads directly to our next observation :

2. Intellectuals are easily bored.

The vast surplus of mental energy with which an intellectual must deal on a day to day basis leads them to have an enormous appetite for mental stimulation, and when, as often is the case, this need is unmet, the result is often boredom. This boredom is particularly difficult to endure for the younger intellectuals, as they are both filled with youthful energy and as yet have not found their particular ways of satisfying their mental needs.

This mental restlessness leads to our next point :

3. Intellectuals are very curious.

Curiosity is, in a sense, the opposite of boredom. It causes intellectuals to explore, whether in their physical environment or the world of the mind. Curiosity takes passive boredom and turns it into an active search for that all important mental stimulation that absorbs that overflowing mental energy and keeps it from spilling over into boredom.

This curiosity leads to things like this :

4. Intellectuals love to learn for its own sake.

Learning new things is inherently pleasurable to intellectuals, and therefore requires no other goal or end. The subject matter has to be of interest to the intellectual, but otherwise the simple act of adding to their sum of knowledge about the subject and about the world is very enjoyable to an intellectual.

Similar to that :

5. Intellectuals love to think about things.

Processing all that learned information in order to integrate it into a larger picture of the subject or even the world is another thing that intellectuals enjoy. Their mental muscle allows them to process information on a deeper level, and this process itself leads to a specific kind of new knowledge, derived knowledge, so in effect it also provides the aforementioned pleasure of learning as well.

It is hardly surprising, then, that :

6. Intellectuals love to apply their minds

The richest and most rewarding form of mental stimulation for intellectuals is to apply their mental muscle to a problem, whether that is a head researcher trying to cure cancer or a high school teacher relaxing with a crossword puzzle. Puzzles and games are quite popular with intellectuals precisely because they can absorb all that thinking energy and give the intellectual something to keep the wild horses of their intellectual minds fully occupied, leaving the rest of their consciousness time to rest.

Intellectuals are as human as anyone else, though, and they don’t operate in a social vacuum, so :

7. Intellectuals like to show off and be praised for their mental abilities.

Even the most bookish and mild-mannered intellectual still seeks a spotlight under which they can shine. Nearly every intellectual got praised for their intellect for at least part of their school life, and that leaves a strong impression on intellectuals during some highly formative years. So whether or not they are conscious of it, all intellectuals crave that experience of being valued and rewarded purely for showing of how bright they were again.

And finally, as we are dealing with social issues :

8. Intellectuals, as a group, tend to have a lower than average social IQ

The thing about intellectuals is that whatever their specialty, their talents, or their interests, all of their abilities come from a core set of extremely powerful abstract reasoning tools. Complex recall, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, symbolic logic, and so forth all allow for an amazing ability to do a wide variety of things.

But they are all based on the same circuit of the brain, the cold and calculating one. And there is another circuit, the warm empathetic one, and that is the one all social skills are derived from.

So by strongly emphasizing the calculation circuit, an intellectual diverts resources from the social circuit, and this makes it hard for them to understand the nuances of social reality.

I hope this little guide has given you some kind of understanding of all that you share in common with your fellow intellectuals, and given you some peace of mind about your place among them.

I will talk to all you nice people later.