There is something deeply illuminating about the relationship between being a nerd, and horseplay.

Or roughhousing, or play-fighting, or rough play, or whatever else you care to call it. We nerdy types do not do it, or rather, we do not do it physically. We take the seemingly sensible position that such rough play has the potential to cause pain, and resembles combat, which frightens and upsets us and seems like a bad thing, so why would we do that if we could avoid it?

And we think we are so smart and so sensible, too smart to do the “dumb” things the normal average kids do. But maybe we are simply too smart for our own good.

Because the thing is, this play-fighting behaviour is clearly instinctual, and lots of people seem driven to do it, both physically and via the verbal version known as “teasing”. And somehow, they do it without killing one another or wrecking their relationships forever. If anything, it seems to strengthen their bonds. not break them apart.

We must then observe that this kind of mock-fighting serves a very important social function, and indeed, we nerdy, intellectual types thing we are being smart and logical when we decline to be involved and completely fail to grasp the social education we are missing, but in reality our decision is very, very short-sighted and filled with the hubris of thinking you always know enough about a situation to make an intelligent decision, when you may in fact be extremely ignorant.

This seemingly logical pose, of “always trying to make the best decision based on what you know of the situation”, is actually extremely limiting and fools you into thinking you are being intelligent when you might instead just making yourself feel better about your own ignorance.

I also think this basic lack of connection to the richer social milieu that others pick up instinctively is the deciding factor in how “weird” or “alien” we seem to others, whether we are severe Asperger’s patients or just mildly nerdy bookish types. By focusing so strongly on the intellect, we also firmly close the door against instinct, preferring to trust our powerful minds over the dark and unverifiable worlds of intuition and instinct.

So we lock away all the rich intelligence and perception that the worlds of intuition and instinct could bring to us. If we do not understand an emotion, if it does not fit with our artificially derived explanations of ourselves or a preconceived idea of how things work, we treat it as noise and filter it out of our conscious perceptions.

Instead, we focus on abstract reasoning, and reap enormous benefits in terms of traditional intelligence, academic potential, and other modern intellectual virtues.

But socially…. we have a problem.

Let us examine what the typical of the species gets from this rough play. Two typical human children, by being able to play-fight and tease one another, create a safe outlet for the tensions and pent-up aggression and emotion that is the natural byproduct of human beings living together. We always get on one another’s nerves, and the urge to compete with one another is always there, lurking behind the relatively recently evolved screen of hunter-gatherer cooperation.

By providing this safe outlet, then, tension and anger are harmlessly dissipated via a stylized and watered down version of the very activities the aggression and anger tell us to do.

And what looks like open naked aggression to a socially ignorant observer is actually a highly refined form of aggression, with its own instinctual rules, the primary of which is “do no real harm”. In this rough play, the participants learn what is “too rough” with one another and over time learn exactly how much they need to restrain themselves with one another in order to stay within “play”.

Once they internalize this limit, they can then play-fight freely, and get the benefits of it.

And this special understanding of how far they can go with one another deepens the bond between them, and makes them feel closer to one another and in a way “safer” with one another because they know they can express their emotions (in whatever form) to one another and the other person will understand the sense in which it is meant.

This lets people let the guard down, and that is basically what social closeness is all about.

But we smarty pants types, we know better, right? We are too smart to engage in all that loud, rough, chaotic kind of play.

And so we absent ourselves from a major form of socialization and social development, and end up socially retarded possibly for our entire lives.

Surely there must be some way to intervene in the lives of young people who might be falling into this trap and gently push them in the right direction. Some way to clue them in that there is far more to this world than their narrow minds and insufficient knowledge can predict. Tell them that sometimes, you can only understand the reason for doing something by doing it.

And that you just might not know everything, and therefore should not be so quick to judge things that others enjoy as “stupid”, “pointless”, or “crazy”.

Those things might not only make a lot of sense, they may make a more profound kind of sense than you with your limited point of view can possibly comprehend unless you have been through it yourself.

We intellectuals tend to downplay experience in favour of knowledge. We pretend that makes us smart, that knowing everything about the road is better than traveling down it, somehow.

But in reality, we are just cowards, afraid of life, afraid of surrendering to the flow and seeing where it takes us.

We don’t want to set one foot on the road without knowing exactly where it will take us.

But life’s not that predictable.

You won’t get anywhere trying to learn everything before you do anything.