“It's not about making sense!” - boggling at human behaviour

I regularly feel confused about behaviour that I observe in other people. And I genuinely mean confuse - just like I am confused when, say, I fail to understand a mathematical equation. I believe that there must be reasons for those people to behave in that way - I just can't see them from where I'm currently standing.  

I specifically mean behaviours that one would generally consider common, mostly quite ordinary. For example, why do people paint their nails? Why do people dress up in ways that go far beyond the fundamental reasons why we wear clothes in the first place? Why do people own so many clothes? Why do people take long hot baths, and also light candles and put on soothing music when they do that? Why do some people make it look like they're having a conversation, but really there is close to no information being exchanged in that "conversation"? Why do people put extremely expensive creams and oils on their body? Why do people buy way more popcorn in the cinema than they can eat? Why do teenagers like to gather in large groups in public places in order to… sit around and say mostly meaningless things? Why do some couples spend nearly all of their time together, every day, while also ending up not doing anything much at all?  

And, before you raise your eyebrows thinking to yourself that I sure must be a naive person for asking those questions. I get it. There *are* explanation for why we see such behaviour. Signalling, hormones, evolution, “trends” and stuff. 

These are valid and good explanations at a certain level of abstraction. But what keeps bugging me is that my brain still cannot model how and why, locally, someone feels inclined to do [insert one of the examples I give above].

***

Recently, I sat in a train, and the woman in front of me had long artificial nails glued onto her fingertips. And, seriously, I’m happy for her to wear whatever the heck she wants. I just… I  want to understand what’s going on in her mind as she’s putting these nails on, or as she’s going through her day with them. I don’t currently get that, and that feels like a hole in my model of the world - which I have to try filling!

And then, it suddenly dawned on me. The puzzle piece I was looking for.

All along, I have been foolishly asking the wrong question. My nagging curiosity was circling around the question of how does that make sense. It has to make sense somehow. 

But it’s not about "making sense" at all.

It feels good. It’s about what it feels like when you do the thing. 

Putting on nice clothes, makeup, jewellery, perfume, grooming your beard.... People like the way it makes them feel. You might feel more confident, more beautiful, more handsome, more put together, more like an adult, more whatever.

Having conversations without exchanging information - it makes you feel like you’re part of your community, or like you’ve done your good deed for the day (having called grandma). 

Spending hours on end with your boy/girl-friend makes you feel like there is someone there, someone “picked you”. That feels good. (Although your day might have been boring like hell. )

The positive valence when conducting a certain behaviour is the vector through which evolution takes its course in a bounded rational actor. You can’t make a bounded rational actor seriously consider and weigh up all his options for most of the time. Instead, you have to compress a bunch of information into a single signal. It's the mechanism through which a behaviour becomes an attractor.

“When I do X, I feel good. I want to do more X.” That’s the immediate vector via which evolution (via mechanisms such as signalling) takes its course. 

***

Epilogue: In order for this mechanism to work (“When I do X, I feel good. I want to do more X.”), your agent needs to be somewhat in touch with their phenomenological experience. This seems more “close to home” for some people than for others. 

And even though my initial somewhat clumsy attempt to make sense of my environment might suggest otherwise, this does make sense to me, too. There are definitely things that I recognise as primarily "feeling good", in a way pushed far into the background the question of whether I have or not a neat story for how these things make sense.

But I have to admit that, for me, a lot of this requires a fairly conscious act of learning. For example, I once painted my nails and consciously paid attention to what it made me feel. It was only then that I realized that I could indeed notice something like “This looks beautiful. That feels nice.” I did a similar thing with taking a bath and trying to actually understand what it is that some people really like about it. While this hasn’t led me to constantly have my fingernails painted or take hot baths on a frequent basis, I’m glad for having and continuing to expand my understanding of human existence. I sure have lots left to learn.

Summer 2020: Cool people lying next to me on the grass.