You Are Too Conservative
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days, again. This is number sixteen.
It’s important to remember that you have a socially conservative bias. At all times, you’re looking for some local norm, and trying to get your actions in line with it. The influence is so strong that it can even be difficult to do weird things alone. Screaming or dancing like a chicken requires some mental preparation, even in an empty room.
This is one of those obvious pieces of information that we are designed to forget. It’s shockingly pervasive and persistent—even if you act boldly for a little while, soon enough, something in you is trying to find a norm to stick to, a way to be conventional, legible, reasonable.
Your conservatism installed in you in a very different time. It was designed to prevent you from being brazen, which, for the vast majority of human history, would get you killed. Eating something weird, saying something weird—these weren’t eccentricities, they were suicidal acts.
But now we live in a reality where intelligently applied brazenness can bring you incredible rewards—and by we, I mean, like, anyone who isn’t living in North Korea. Indiscriminate extroversion is a huge personal force multiplier, as well as a way to have fun. You can meme whole social movements into being by sheer will if you just say something compellingly odd enough times. On a smaller scale, you can just do that thing you want to do but haven’t. Nobody will murder you for writing poetry.
There are some rules that aren’t worth breaking. Sometimes risk aversion is advisable. But your amorphous dread is not a good measure. That intuitive, moment-to-moment self-consciousness is a terrible judge of whether a given action is actually dangerous. It’s an outdated adaptation. It’s as if the human species had kept gills after leaving the ocean, and you were still using them to breathe.
You're too powerful.