Part of the joy, and sometimes misery, of being a writer is that you find stories wherever you are. Listening, observing, and intellectually ingesting the world around you is how writers generate content. Sometimes you get lucky and find yourself happy or wistful when searching for a story. Other times, you might wake up on the wrong side of the bed and the world seems to be a cacophony of annoying prattle and exasperating social interaction. Unfortunately, the latter was where I found myself last Monday.
It was 9 a.m., and it was a bad day. Nursing my fifth coffee and clacking away at my computer, I was attempting to drown my less than happy demeanor with the solitude of productivity. Just as I was relaxing into a peaceful rhythm, two of the loudest, chattiest girls sat behind me. I briefly entertained the thought of "accidentally" pouring my iced coffee on them so that they'd go away, but I figured that would probably cause an undesirable social spectacle.
While pulling my headphones out of my backpack and preparing to drown out the babble, I unintentionally overheard the following:
"... I just, I don't know. I've never heard my dad yell at my mom like that before. They usually don't yell at anyone. I mean, we go to church every Sunday and they always seem happy. It was scary. My brother and I both cried in the other room," said Girl Number One.
"Oh please," responded Girl Number Two. "My parents are both divorced and I didn't even see my dad for three months after. Don't even. It was just a fight. It'll be fine, get over it."
At first, that conversation didn't really bother me. I mean, rationally speaking, Girl Number Two was right. Having two divorced parents does sound a lot worse than overhearing a fight. However, upon introspection, I realized that Girl Number Two's response was an example of something that we, as a society, have unintentionally promoted since primordial evolution: the art of "one-upping" other people.
Psychologically speaking, the reason we one-up people is painfully simple: we're looking for food. Huh?
Yeah, you read that correctly. The art of one-upping began in the early primitive years of our ape-like mammalian ancestors. You see, when ancient monkey men met other monkey men, their first instinct was to dominate. To "see if they would get bitten if they reached for food" as quoted by Dr. Loretta Breuning. In short, they wanted to see who would eat/dominate who in a fight.
Eventually, one of the monkey men would win. When this happened, the dominant monkey man's brain would release serotonin. For those unfamiliar, serotonin is a neuro-chemical in your brain that makes you feel happy. So, when one monkey man dominated another in a fight for survival, it felt pretty darn good. Subsequently, the dominant monkey man was motivated to continue exerting his dominance over others.
Fast-forward a few centuries down the road of our evolutionary timeline. We shed some hair and now have better posture. However, we still have similar brain structure. For example, we still feel an inherent need to dominate other submissives.
Take Girl Number Two, for example. After her friend relayed an incredibly vulnerable and heartbreaking experience, Two's first instinct was to dominate the conversation by declaring her own problems as superior. Doing this made her feel good, even if in a slightly sick way.
Although Two's experience, to the blind eye, was seemingly worse than Girl One's experience, comparing the two was crass. You see, people have drastically different emotional pain thresholds as a result of varying life experiences.
Her background is clearly that of a nuclear, heteronormative family who I'm assuming -- because she's in college -- is middle or upper-middle class. To her, the thought of her family fighting might be the worst thing she could imagine. She might not have had to experience that kind of tension growing up, so this might be the most traumatic thing that she's experienced.
Conversely, Two may be used to it; it sounds like she had a pretty rough time growing up. To her, the gravity of her problems exceeded those of her friend. Girl Two didn't stop to think about the fact that Girl One might feel the same way about her parents fighting that Girl Two did about her parent's divorce. Girl Two probably made her friend feel even worse about her situation without even realizing it all because of an inherent, and sometimes unintentional, need to exert dominance and inadvertently experience a serotonin flush.
The moral of this article is to remember that, when you're getting ready to "one-up" someone who is having a hard time, some people have had drastically different experiences than you. Don't make an ape out of yourself.
