Wired Weird

We humans are wired weird. We do not func­tion quite like any other liv­ing crea­ture. Strange as it may seem, we are ful­filled only by emp­ty­ing our­selves for oth­ers. Noth­ing makes us more mis­er­able than seek­ing our own com­fort. The more we try to fix oth­ers, the more bro­ken we become. Despite our great­est impov­er­ish­ment, we find the means to con­tinue cre­at­ing.

We are the only crea­tures that have an entire range of expres­sion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion based in laugh­ter. Ani­mals grieve, but only humans lament. We dress our­selves in a wide vari­ety of cos­tumes. Like the ani­mal world, some of this has to do with mat­ing. Men strut like roost­ers. Women preen like pea­cocks. What sets us apart from the rest of cre­ation is our abil­ity to write nov­els and pro­duce movies ded­i­cated to our social needs and van­i­ties.

No two peo­ple are wired exactly alike. That makes it all the more inter­est­ing. “Weird” is entirely a mat­ter of per­spec­tive. Nor­mal to one is strange to another. The fas­ci­nat­ing thing is that humans people-watch. We are enter­tained by sim­ply look­ing at other peo­ple. Ants march, but only peo­ple parade. Ani­mals play, but they don’t build foot­ball sta­di­ums.

The strangest thing about us is that we think we know how we are wired, but we really do not. Other peo­ple may actu­ally see us more objec­tively than we see our­selves, but they can­not know exactly how we feel. We are infi­nitely com­plex but have sim­ple daily needs and rou­tines. Feed­ing troughs and water­ing holes are abun­dant in the human world. We pre­fer to eat in groups rather than alone. Para­dox­i­cally, we can even find soli­tude in large groups. We try to cap­ture life in pic­tures and record­ings, but it defies our efforts.

With­out a doubt, our own ten­den­cies to self-defeat are our hall­mark. Ani­mals do not make com­plex weapons of war. They don’t have to. They may com­pete and fight for their daily sur­vival, but they do not plot the erad­i­ca­tion of major parts of the globe in the name of rit­ual, or reli­gion, or race. They tend to con­sume only what they need.

We have a lot in com­mon with other liv­ing crea­tures, but unlike them, we can­not live on instinct alone. We are the “animal-angel” on a life mis­sion — con­fused by our very being. How we got this far with­out total anni­hi­la­tion is a mys­tery. Amaz­ingly, we are just now dis­cov­er­ing the genetic schematic of our ner­vous sys­tems. How­ever, what intrigues us most is not the hard­ware of our nerves, but the soft­ware of our hopes.