By 
Let me start by saying this: The evidence that people suck is pretty rock solid.
Self-improvement is an uphill battle. We’re not naturally awesome, hard-working, ass-kickers of the universe that have fallen from grace, who just need to get back to our typical ass-kicking ways. We’re naturally sloth-like, immediate gratification junkies that need to be yanked out of our coma-like state to do things that actually improve our lives.
If not forced to worry about human survival, we won’t do anything to survive. We’ll sit on couches, scroll through our phones, gargle hydrogenated oils, and not call our representatives up until the point when doing so is a life or death decision.
Naturally, we’re lazy, naturally we don’t think for ourselves, and naturally we bow to the whims of even the most horrendous leaders.
But just because this is who we naturally are doesn’t mean this is who we have to be. And unlike usual, I’m not just talking out of my ass here. There’s actual evidence that we mostly suck but also don’t have to.
We all want to eat cheese and Jolly Ranchers every day, and yet people diet.
We all want to never work again, and yet, we go to work.
When men see a woman with a nice ass, they feel an intense urge to grab it and yell “awoooga!” and yet, most of them don’t.
We can always recondition ourselves to suck less. There is always hope that you can be less worthless and terrible at life. We can fight our baser instincts and be something more than the grab-assing, cheese eating, do nothing losers we all are deep inside.
The first step to not sucking is being fully aware of exactly how we naturally suck. We can see some of this by looking at ourselves or what’s in our fridge, but the overarching, overpowering little diseases that come standard in nearly every human can be best found in research.
So let me get us started. Here are three studies that show how awful we are as people, and what we can do to fix these problems.
1. Asch’s Experiment: The Goth Kids Are Right
We’re all a bunch of conformist losers.
Asch’s famous experiment showed participants side by side diagrams of lines of varying lengths, and asked which ones were the same length.
The catch was that everybody but one of the participants was an actor who was asked to say the wrong answer.
It was found that when the group all said a wrong answer–even for something as easy as “Which line is the right length, you fucking idiots?” the participant often joined in with the actors and also said the wrong answer.
So basically, we’re scientifically likely to engage in groupthink. Many of us would naturally rather be safe in a group’s wrong thought than venture off onto our own and have an opinion as unique and brave as, “No it’s the third line, you dipshits.”
If everyone around us is confidently saying, “The earth is a cube, the earth is a cube,” and it happens enough, most of us will eventually ignore what we know to be true, and just be like “Man, life is tough here on the upper right corner.”
This is dangerous for obvious reasons. The growth of Naziism wasn’t everybody consciously saying, “Yeah I too want to murder the Jews. That’s a rational thought that I have,” by their own accord. But enough people got loudly passionate and bold about it to where meek little losers were looking around at everyone heiling, and going, “Okay, heil, I guess.”
This isn’t just dangerous because you could accidentally trip and fall into Naziism. In your everyday life, you can be pressured to say the wrong thing, or inject the wrong substance, or even do the mannequin challenge because it’s what the group is doing.
And ultimately, when you go with the group because you feel safe in your numbers, you’re not really being yourself. You’re losing yourself in the shuffle of the rest of the world. This is a good way to survive, but a fucking awful way to thrive. You’ll never be more than you currently are living like this, because you can’t even consistently be you.
What should we do about it?
The way to make sure you’re not being a groupthink dipshit is to stay aware of the possibility. Be aware of the instinct you have to say the wrong line. Trust yourself. Justify what you’re thinking to yourself constantly. Stay vigilant of the shit that’s passing through your brain and check on it so that one day, you don’t wake up and realize, “Fuck, I’ve been a Nazi who can’t tell line length for years now.”
2. Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford prison experiment gave people roles as guards and prisoners and had them pretend to play the roles in a prison setting. Within a couple of days participants got all Daniel Day-Lewis with their roles, and shit got dark in a hurry. The guards were becoming power-hungry assholes, and the prisoners quickly became meek, depressed little weaklings. People really started to believe this is how things were in reality, and were at risk of long term psychological damage–so much so that they ended the experiment early.
The lesson here is that if we’re placed into any role at all, we’re at risk of adhering to our role at all costs–even to horrifying degrees.
There’s a reason we’re prone to this. Roles give us comfort, and a place in the world–to such a degree that when given one, we can lose ourselves in the role (again, like Daniel Day-Lewis). The danger arrives when we tend to view the role as more important than who we are, our own morals, or our own priorities. It becomes easier to just fully be whatever the assigned role is.
After all, being a manager at a Red Robin is easy and comforting. Being Greg is fucking hard, and complicated and messy.
Losing sight of this is how people grow up to become CEOs that ruin third world villages and first world economies, cops that shoot innocent people, and your grandma that stuffs your gut full of sugary bread until you’re literally about to die. She feels very much like it’s her role to give you Diabetes.
So what should we do about it?
We need to maintain awareness that we are not our descriptors. Those can change throughout our lives, but our values and commitment to not being a dick should remain resolute. We need to keep in touch with and stay true to who we are first–regardless of situation, job, or role, because knowing yourself is the first step to being somewhat mentally healthy.
We need to prioritize awareness of and pride in who we are, so that we can enjoy who we really are, and so that when someone hands us a baton, we don’t immediately shrug, and start beating people with it.
3. The Halo Effect
Too many studies to list have demonstrated that when given the choice, we view pretty people as being kinder, more trustworthy, more intelligent, and way more suitable to parent children (to be fair, that last one’s usually our dick’s opinion, so I’m not sure if it counts).
If everything else is at all close to equal, we’ll always think the girl with the flat waist and Kardashian makeup is way funnier, way more insightful, and way more qualified to be a nuclear engineer at our plant.
This is natural. Most of us recognize that it’s happening in general, but rarely do we realize it in the moment, so it’s crucial that we remind ourselves. We must expect ourselves to be superficial pieces of garbage around every turn because it is essentially built into us to be like this…
…unless we consciously recognize it and put a stop to it, of course. Then what the fuck. Of course we can and should do something about it.
This is something we should prioritize addressing not just because it’s unfair and a form of prejudice, but because we might be missing out on really good interactions just because someone has a shitty nose or a triple chin, and that sucks. We might be hiring some incompetent boob at a job just because of their, well, boobs, and miss out on the actual decent candidate in front of us–all because our values are inherently fucking terrible. Those of us that succumb to this open ourselves up to a less efficient, less engaging, less interesting lives.
So what should we do about it?
We need to go the extra mile to make sure that ugly Americans have equal rights. You need to approach your interactions with the world with a mindset of Ugly Affirmative Action. Combat your anti-uggo bias, by always assuming that the ugly person you’re talking to is a little more deserving of your attention, that they have something more interesting to say, or that they’ll be a better contributor to your team.
You can try to do this all you want, and you’ll probably still revert to preferring pretty people to some extent (because you know, we’re all stupid fucking monkeys at the end of the day), but the more you can combat this awful tendency we have going into your interaction, the more you’ll be on the right path.
So right now, in our natural state, we’re mostly lazy, superficial, group-following, single-minded monsters waiting for a reason to shit all over the world.
Let’s acknowledge that. And let’s make extra efforts to treat people and ourselves with fairness, decency, and try real hard not to prioritize people in the order in which we want to fuck them.
We can do this. To some extent we already ignore our shitty natural state in the pursuit of better behavior all the time. We just have to do it in more ways. So let’s all–right now–look in the mirror and say, “I’m kind of terrible on the inside, but that doesn’t mean I have to be on the outside.”
