A Pro-Human Manifesto

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! I’ve done the thing again. I’ve written a really long essay by mistake. I swear I didn’t meant to do it. We’ve definitely gone back to basics though, in case you were wondering if you were now stuck with random pieces about Europe or what have you. This is just a Chunky Column About Thoughts And Feelings. We’re back, baby!

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A column

I first found out about needless cruelty at the age of 4, maybe 5. I was in maternelle and some girls invited me to play a game with them, which involved standing in a circle in the playground and saying all the bad words we could think of, and had heard grown-ups say in front of us. I discovered intimacy that day, and can still remember being arms in arms with my schoolmates, giggling and whispering things we shouldn't have.

I still can't really make sense of what happened next. I said some words, following everyone's lead, and the girls decided to pretend they'd not been playing that game at all, and were shocked to hear me say such bad things, and they went to report me to the teacher, who duly told me off. Had they lured me in for the specific purpose of eventually betraying my trust, and getting me grounded? I'll never find out. I can't think of another reason why they did what they did. I can't think of a reason why such small children would behave in such a vicious way.

Well, I can't and I can. This was the first incident but there were many others. I was bullied pretty relentlessly from kindergarten all the way to the beginning of high school. For a decade, I was mocked, pushed, beaten, and generally treated as a repulsive oddity, who could never for one moment be left to think that she would ever belong. It was pretty tiring! I wouldn't say I enjoyed it.

If I had to choose, I would say that the physical bullying was the most bearable of the lot, as getting shoved around gets your adrenaline up and your blood pumping, if nothing else. It makes you feel pretty alive. Having every aspect of your personality, fashion sense, behaviour and appearance mocked just makes you want to cry. It's also harder to predict.

I remember having this t-shirt my mum bought me, when I was 8 or 9. It was white and tight and said "I Miss You" in bright, glittery pink and swirly letters. Everyone else in my class was 10 or 11 then - I started school early then skipped a year at 7 - but their English still wasn't that great. They parsed the slogan as "You Miss Me", because the relevant French verb works the other way round, and somehow that was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Who could possibly ever miss Marie? I don't think I wore the t-shirt to school again.

I was alright, though, on the whole. I never self-harmed, never fell into depression, never really lashed out in any of the predictable ways. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't, but think I can hazard a guess. You see, I was a genius. I learnt to read when I was very young, and my grandmother would often rave about the quality and tenor of our conversations, even though I was only a little child.

My family had several IQ tests done, and the number that came back was all big and sexy and impressive. As a tween, I was sent to see an adult psychotherapist, as it was decided that sending me to a kiddy shrink would be an insult to my intellect. Some time around then, one of the various adults who'd been tasked with assessing me told my relatives that I was intellectually way ahead of my peers; socially slightly behind my peers; emotionally the equivalent of a pet rock. I may have paraphrased that last part, though only slightly.

Naturally, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell a child that they're very good at one thing and very bad at another, they will pretty obviously end up throwing themselves at the former, and trying to ignore the latter as much as possible.

I was bullied as a child and a young teenager and in some ways it was miserable but in other ways it was fine, because I was also being told that I was better than everyone else anyway, and they were probably just jealous or, at best, just couldn't possibly understand where I was coming from. I, on the other hand, had this great big brain but no real capacity for human emotion, and so I acted like it. It was a weird life but I couldn't really tell that it was, because I'd never known anything else.

Things started changing when I, precocious class warrior that I was, begged my parents to let me leave the hellish Catholic private school I'd entered at the age of 3, and instead head to the local state high school. They agreed and, at 13 and three quarters, I joined something which felt a bit closer to the real world. I still got bullied a bit there, because clearly I'm just always going to be one of those people, but for the most part people ignored me, or befriended me with vague enthusiasm.

Still, I refused to let go of my comfort blanket. I don't actually remember mentioning my IQ all that much in those years but somehow it became one of my nicknames, used semi-affectionately and semi-mockingly even by looser acquaintances, so clearly it was an active part of my personality.

I'd spent my childhood quietly assuming I was an alien and would eventually come and be picked up by my real, alien family and brought home to my true planet. My teenage years were spent getting slowly but surely used to life on earth, but I still felt like a benevolent alien a lot of the time. Humans were, perhaps, no longer worth fearing, but it wasn't clear to me that I was fully one of them.

It took me a really long time to get out of that mindset. If I'm honest, I occasionally still feel like I'm there; not quite waiting for the spaceship to turn up and take me home, but not quite comfortable down here either. What helps, when I feel like this, is to think of the scenes in Doctor Who when the Doctor talks about humans, and gets all soft and misty-eyed and full of awe. People! They're so messy and weird and wet and petty but look at them! Underestimate them at your peril! They may just be the best this universe has to offer!

These monologues always make me tear up. I think I can blame that reaction on the three weeks I spent doing nothing but smoke weed, garden and watch Doctor Who back when I was 19. How and why I came to do that is a different story, perhaps for another time, but the point is: I got so stoned and watched so much Doctor Who that I ended up genuinely hearing the Tardis noise outside my window. I'm pretty sure those weeks rewired my brain in a pretty fundamental way.

That's also what I wanted to talk about today, though I guess I got carried away. I meant to give you a bit of context so I could say that "liking people" isn't something that came to me naturally at all. I felt you'd need at least a slice of background to get the extent to which that statement is true. There are, I think, an absurdly high number of timelines in which I remained a recluse, a cynic, a misanthrope, or a plain old prat. Well, jury's still out on the latter, but I like to think that I am, just about, getting away with it.

I love people a lot now, at the age of 33, and it never was a foregone conclusion. That's probably why I feel so strongly about it as a topic of discussion. A lot of what I've written, both for this newsletter and in general, has tried to argue, in a variety of ways, that people are good and you should want to spend more time in touch with your fellow man. A lot of it was about the pandemic and its aftermath, but it actually started before that. As it happens, I wrote about the dangers of glamourising bailing on plans in January 2020, as we were just beginning to feel the ripples of the pangolin fucking that bat. I've been on this beat for a long time.

I do just feel the need to keep saying it, though. There were lockdowns and afterwards many people felt that actually, staying at home and only interacting with people they were close to already was the way to go. We're now in the process of getting AI shoved into all our orifices at once and, somehow, many people seem to think it feels like a good way to go through life. Please, no human frailty or unpredictability; all we want is isolation and the cold certainty of the machines. Do we really, though?

I guess that's my question. Well, more precisely - my question is about whether we've even stopped to ask ourselves that question. We're creatures of habit, as a species, and it doesn't take much for us to tweak our routines, and not really think about what we've done. I reckon that relatively few people have stopped at some point between 2022 and now to truly take stock and have a big think about what they wanted to bring back from their pre-pandemic life, what they were happy to have junked, and what they still aren't sure about.

Similarly, I worry that only a small minority of people using, say, ChatGPT, have really taken a beat to think through what they want to use the AI chatbot for, what their limits ought to be, and what the upsides and downsides seem to be. Our lives just keep changing in pretty massive ways, and without us really stopping and wondering if we're enjoying our direction of travel.

It's something I feel strongly about because, at some point, I had to decide to like people. My life didn't make me do it by default. It was something I had to think about, and choose to do. I'm not being clumsy in my choice of words here, by the way: I think that liking someone, or a group of people, or the concept of humanity, is something you do. It's an active choice.

Long-term romantic love requires you to wake up next to the same person every morning and choose to keep wanting to wake up next to them. Being pro-people means leaving the house every day and choosing to tell that old lady that her dog looks sweet, and sticking your tongue out at the kid who's bored out of their mind while waiting for mum to finish paying, and getting involved if you overhear a conversation and think you have something to add which will be of help.

It means moving through the world and being conscious of the strangers around you, and of the many small ways in which you could make their lives better, or they could make your life better, or you could just enhance each other's day without even having to try all that hard. It's a choice you make again, and again, and again, and that you keep making because faith is something you practice, not merely a dormant part of your brain. It's a choice you make because the only other option is to believe you're entirely alone or, at best, surrounded by only a handful of people. I've been there before and can tell you it's no way to live.

There are some who will argue that this is a manifesto for extroverts but that would be missing the point, both because this manichean way to see the world is a misguided one, and because no-one is asking anyone to talk to everyone all the time. That being said, I do believe that making an effort does mean…doing just that. I bristle at the people who shrug and say they're introverts, as if that explains everything, when really they sound like people who've simply chosen to give up.

As discussed at length earlier, people and I didn't exactly get off to a good start. I'm not one of those smug people who was somehow always great at getting then keeping attention. Being social is something I had to purposely learn, like swimming or enjoying vegetables. Maybe that's why I'm so attached to it; it feels good to have become proficient at something that once felt so entirely alien.

It also means I'm wholly conscious of all the ways in which it changes me for the better. Even the most minor of pleasant interactions with a stranger can lift my mood and turn my day around, because I choose to let it do that to me. I choose to feel the warmth of human interaction, be conscious of it, and let it make my heart swell, even for just a moment. I choose to see it as a sign that most people are, if not wholly good, then certainly capable of fleeting moments of true goodness.

That really is the point, I think - no-one has to be pleasant to anyone else, or vaguely helpful, or to make a little joke out of nowhere to lighten the mood. We're under no obligation to cheer up our fellow man, or make it known that we think their baby looks sweet. No one's making us do it, and yet here we are! It's entirely possible that I'm spending too much time thinking about all this right now because I'm watching The Good Place again, but I think my point stands.

There's something so deeply life-affirming about these daily reminders, coming from either you or the people around you, that there isn't actually much we owe to each other, as strangers, but sometimes we can simply decide to act like there is. That is, in my view, the spiritual opposite of letting yourself be mindlessly carried towards misanthropy by post-lockdown habits and the increasing influence of AI.

Of course, it requires more work, but that's the entire point. It's easy and tempting to opt for solitude because nothing is more straightforward than lying to yourself, sometimes even without realising that you're doing it. For a long time I hid in my bedroom and in the corners of the playground and I convinced myself that I was too clever to be understood, and that intellect was the only thing that truly mattered in the world.

Eventually I left the house and I joined the other students at the café and, over time, I realised that no-one really gives a shit about your IQ, or your ability to solve maths problems in your head, or whatever else may have impressed nearby grown-ups when you were a seven-year old. There isn't even one way of being clever, and there's little point in trying to measure intelligence anyway. It's all redundant, and only matters to those who have nothing else to hold onto.

We also started getting drunk around then, and that really turned out to be a great leveller. Suddenly we were all getting blitzed and acting like morons, and somehow that was the most fun I’d ever had in my whole life. It only came around a few times a week, for a few hours at a time, but it offered me a series of brief windows into what felt like a better and freer way to be.

After I finished school I moved abroad and that gave me an opportunity to try on a new life, like it was an outfit, and it built a barrier between my childhood and adulthood which was more definite than most people's. I changed countries and languages and it made sense to change personalities as well. It made sense for me to take the Eurostar and emerge as a new person, ready to embrace the entire world.

I learnt how to live in English and how to get around London and, at the same time, I taught myself the ways of people. I threw myself in the arms of whoever would have me, time and time again, and sometimes I was betrayed and lived to regret it but, mostly, I built myself a solid web of friendship and goodwill.

It took me years and years to get to where I am today, and I wouldn't exchange that journey for the world. I love my friends but I love my acquaintances as well; I know so many of my neighbours, and the people who run my local businesses, and it can be hard for me to leave the house without exchanging at least a few words with someone, somewhere. I've no idea who I would be without all of them. I can't imagine what navigating the many lows of the past few years would have been if I'd remained alone.

My only worry is that I climbed that mountain while, at the same time, countless others were letting themselves slide all the way back down. I wake up every day and I choose to keep loving people, with every fibre of my being, and I watch as our recent past and encroaching future work overtime to pull us apart.

I also have no idea if any of what I've just written has been in any way persuasive, as I find it so hard to argue in favour of things I think of as so self-evidently good. How would you make the case for eating ice cream in the sun, or kissing your loved one on the lips? I know I'd struggle to put any of it into words.

I tried to make the case for people today, because I'd been meaning to do it for weeks and weeks, and hopefully I got at least some of the way there. As I was writing it, I took a brief break to chat with the woman next to me in the park, who was playing with a spaniel. The dog, it turns out, was adopted after being found in Ireland, and now belongs to the woman's daughter. "That's probably the only grandchild she's going to give me", she told me, "...and that works great for me!". She laughed and I giggled and I scratched the spaniel's ears and when she left we said bye to each other like we were friends.

I'm spending my day by myself but, for a little while, I got to stop by a window and peer into the inside of someone's life, and my own life got a little bit richer as a result. I hope something similar will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. I love people and maybe, deep down, I always did, but them loving me? I don't think I'll ever get used to it. I hope I never do.