Sending Our Problems Downstream

Notes on a raw moment.

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It was a raw moment.

Recently, I was getting ready to order at a drive-thru when someone pulled up behind me and sat on their horn—twice. Any other day, I would’ve flipped them off or just ignored them. Not this time! I’ve been so fed up with this behavior, in every corner of my life lately, that I parked my car, got out, and confronted them. I said, “Why do you feel the need to be such an obnoxious asshole???”

After threatening to shoot me, the person in question said it was their right to blast their horn at anyone who got in their way.

They were late for work.

Eventually, they calmed down and explained the real reason. They’d just gotten into a fight with someone else, and they were still lit up.

They were sending their anger downstream.

They trotted out something of an apology, I apologized for getting up in their face, we commiserated over the proliferation of assholes in society, and we parted ways. Fortunately, there was nobody else behind us.

Suffice to say, I didn’t stay there. I drove somewhere else. When I got there, someone asked me for some money because they hadn’t eaten all day. I gave them twenty bucks. Not for any particular reason. Maybe the universe was giving me a test. Someone had just been an incredible asshole to me, because someone was an asshole to them, so what was I going to do? Be an asshole to someone else and send that energy downstream, or be kind to them?

I was kind, in a forgetful way.

It was casual kindness.

Look, I don’t advise anyone to go around confronting every jerk they encounter. (You’ll probably get shot for real.) Fortunately, I find myself at a drive-thru once or twice a year. But I think if you ever really want to take this country’s pulse, that’s where you would want to go.

These raw moments show you what’s really going on in the world, what’s really simmering under the surface, ready to erupt.

The mindfulness wonks say we have a loneliness crisis. They say we have a mental health crisis. They say we need to slow down and connect more. It’s all true, but I think we’ve strayed well beyond that point as a culture. We have something much worse than that, and there’s a name for it.

It’s called a behavioral sink.

This term emerged from experiments run by a behavioral scientist named John B. Calhoun. He built little utopias for rats and mice with unlimited resources but limits on space. The rodents eventually descended into a maelstrom of aggression, killing each other in pointless turf wars, until only a handful of survivors remained—and they chose to live in isolation.

Calhoun’s experiments inspired another behavioral scientist, Edward Hall, to develop the theory of proxemics. It’s a similar idea, that humans don’t just need resources. They need space to feel safe.

I’ve studied behavioral sinks before, but it boomeranged back around as the most appropriate way to describe what we’re going through. We’re not just lonely. We’re not just moving too fast. There’s something deeper. We aren’t getting enough time and space to take care of ourselves.

We’re freaking out.

As our rights and self-worth are stripped from us, we’re conditioned to indulge in meaningless spectacles of individual freedom, like the freedom to play music as loud as we want, regardless of who it bothers, to talk in movie theaters, to tailgate, to cut off pedestrians at crosswalks, to swipe in line, to shout at baristas, or to blast your horn at someone in the drive-thru. Everyone fixates on these tiny little patches of self-esteem in a sea of exploitation and despair.

We think watching a video about stoicism makes us stoic. We think doing mindfulness exercises makes us mindful. We think writing something down on a slip of paper and dropping it in a jar makes us grateful.

It doesn’t.

You have to practice that in the real world, with real people, even when they’re not listening to you, even when they’re demanding all your energy, even when they’re not returning the favor, even when you’re late for work and you just got into a fight, even when they’re threatening to pull a gun on you.

It’s hard.

For what it’s worth, if you’re looking to regain a sense of agency and self-esteem after feeling robbed of both, doing a casual kindness does the job a little better than sending your turmoil downstream.

Here’s the thing: we’re not just lonely. We’re increasingly caught between the desire to connect and the desire to punish someone. Even when we try to socialize, we often trap each other in the most trivial and banal forms of interaction. I think many of us secretly hate each other. We blame each other for the state of the world. Someone pecks or punches down on us, and we need to restore our sense of power and self-worth by doing it to someone else, for the slightest offense. We all want to punish each other for something someone else did.

And we’re all right.

But we’re going about it all wrong. We’re not really dealing with it, we’re just sending it all downstream for someone else.

To varying extents, we’re all responsible for the state of the world. We don’t really want to be with each other right now, because we’re hiding all that hostility—and it often has nowhere to go. We seek surrogate communities online. Sometimes, we find them. Other times, we only sink into the very noise we’re trying to escape. So, it’s no wonder a lot of us are looking for someone to cancel all the time. It’s no wonder we’re choosing to make friends with robots. It’s no wonder a lot of us have started seeking artificial companions. We’re more than lonely.

We’re traumatized.

Instead of dealing with our trauma, we’re trying to dominate each other. It’s going to take a lot more than a few podcasts to fix the mess we’re in. Maybe we won’t fix it. Maybe we’ll all end up like those rats in the crashed utopias. Anyway, I’m blathering. What am I saying? I guess, this: If someone threatens to shoot you because you’re in their way, don’t send it downstream.

Do the opposite of that.

Clean it up.