Enthusiastic Dissonance
There’s a phrase I’ve wanted to coin for a while now. It’s possible that someone else has beaten me to it but if so, I’m not aware of it. I have met at least a few other people who have experienced this concept, so I know it’s not an original observation. In any case, what I’m attempting to describe might best be called “enthusiastic dissonance.” Let me explain.
I’ve always been pretty introverted. Crowds always were, and still are pretty difficult for me. When I was in high school and college, my friends quite understandably wanted to go to concerts. The whole idea of going to a concert has always made me very anxious. Back in high school, and to some degree in college, I lacked the self-awareness to properly identify just how anxious the idea made me. In hindsight, it couldn’t have been more obvious. I wouldn’t sleep the night before the concert. I’d overeat the day of the concert. During the concert it was even worse. I’d find something to focus my mind on so I could endure being at the concert. Each song, I’d try to count and figure out if the concert was closer to being over. (if the show is about 1.5 hours, and each song is 3-5 minutes, and 12 songs have passed, I’m likely to be here for x more minutes …) Children and adolescents (and people of all ages, really) implicitly mirror each other. And so I spent most of my time at a concert worrying while attempting to give the impression that I wasn’t worried whatsoever. To me, it looked like this was what everyone else was doing. And of course, I didn’t wholly hate the concert. I like the music, and I liked the idea that I was doing something popular and adventurous. Implicitly, I sort of decided that going to concerts must be a bit like exercising or eating your vegetables; you don’t actually enjoy it, but afterwards you’re sort of happy you went.. And of course most other people must be having something like my experience: of course they don’t like being in a loud, crowded environment. No one could really enjoy being in a loud, crowded environment. Everyone must have been faking it the same way I was, so they could force themselves to enjoy the good parts.
Obviously, it turned out I was wrong. People love going to concerts, and they love being around lots of people in an exciting, loud space. They don’t have to force themselves to endure concerts. To most people, they’re enjoyable in and of themselves and require no further justification. They would go to more often if they had more money and free time. I couldn’t see this very obvious fact because I was unable to see outside my own perspective. Because I was unable to see outside my own perspective, I ended up finding an incorrect explanation for the enthusiasm that I was correctly observing. And that’s “enthusiastic dissonance” in a nutshell. I’ve encountered this in all sorts of areas in my life where it turns out that I’m far off the bell curve of normal human experience. “Surely people don’t really like going restaurants.” or “of course no one actually likes reality TV,” etc. You can see where this is going. It’s important not to lose sight, then, that “enthusiastic dissonance” is more of a commentary on the person who experiences it than it is on society, or other people. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying concerts, or reality TV, or whatever else. I was simply too narrow minded to understand why other people could enjoy these things. Let me give you another example. This one will be a bit shorter.
My aunt is quite a bit older than I am, and was born sometime in the 1940s. She was a very classical feminist in two distinct ways: she was born before 3rd wave / post-modern feminism, and so was never really immersed into much of what constitutes modern day feminism. Additionally, she was just strictly never very feminine. She never understood why girls couldn’t wear pants. (remember, she grew up in the 50s and 60s) She didn’t want to wait for a man to ask her to dance. She could list hundreds of other examples, but in short she felt at odds with society just while being herself. For her feminism was much more about not having to feel weird for being the kind of person she wanted to be. In any case, I was visiting her with my wife and the topic of fashion magazines came up. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but my aunt explained matter-of-factly: “You know, no one really likes fashion magazines. They just pretend they like them so they can fit in with everyone else.” Interestingly, my aunt had made the exact same error I had. She couldn’t see outside of her perspective, and couldn’t understand how someone could actually enjoy the contents of a fashion magazine. Like me, my aunt devised an incorrect explanation for the enthusiasm that she correctly observed. She fundamentally could not correctly envision the perspectives of other people, and just assumed everyone must feel compelled to fake interest.
I don’t want to make too much of this observation. It’s something which has struck me over and over, which (as I noted above) probably says more about me than it does the world around me. But, maybe you’ve had this experience too. Maybe you struggled to understand some basic human experience, and just assumed everyone else was pretending. If so, I hope you find this at least somewhat informative. There are many different ways to misunderstand others, and this is just one of the ways misunderstanding can play out.
Scott Alexander wrote a much longer and better article which covered a similar aspect of this topic. In part of it, he quotes a woman’s experience shared on Quora who had “anosmia.” (ie, she was able to smell) It’s absolutely worth a read, but the gist is that a woman who was totally unable to smell things just mirrored people socially. She states: “I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses.” She did all these things despite not actually being able to smell anything. She was just mirroring the social experience of others without really understanding what she was mirroring. In some sense, I think this is just how we learn. We imitate first, and understand later. Sometimes, understanding just isn’t possible and so we’re stuck imitating.