Confessions of a misanthrope

I hate to admit it, but...

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a fan of people. Well, ‘people’ as in ‘groups of’.

It’s a nuanced thing.

One person, two people, three people great. Four people, five people, six people, good? As long as we know each other extremely well or there are distractions. Seven people, ten people, fifteen people, thirty okay it better be a party I can wallpaper in otherwise I get awkward and start to get cult flashbacks, and if we’re outdoors I hate it all and There Are Too Many People. Unless it’s thousands of people. That’s okay. Thousands of people marching or sitting in a park or standing in a stadium is so big it loses its gravitational pull to a cultish group dynamic.

I am the person who remembers the days when Saunders and Dalebrook tidal pools had three people in them in the mornings and now squirms at the 50 that spread their body ooze in a stagnant low tide at 6 am taking selfies. Ten people at the hiking spot you just climbed four hours to get to? Ten People Too Many. Humans outdoors enjoying the promenade in the sunshine? Too. Many. People.

To reiterate: I do not like people in groups unless I am the centre of their adoring attention and that never happens.

I don’t want to be this way, truly.

But people in groups create a strange beast that is not to be trusted. In Tanya Meeson world, Dogville is a documentary, Shirley Jackon’s The Lottery a public service announcement. Maybe it’s PTSD from my cult days, maybe it’s Maybelline, but whatever it is, people in groups small enough to organise freak me the fuck out.

I don’t know anything about the study of group dynamics, but I’ve seen with my eyeballs that without anyone trying or meaning to, the group must be led, the group must have hierarchy, the group must have those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’, the group must consider itself better than ‘the others’. The group will eventually morph into this no matter how much it believes it won’t. This inevitability is the very nature of groups.

Now, I wouldn’t say this distrust verging on distaste for the many is my most attractive characteristic. So why am I sharing this?

Well, I am telling you this because I am about to go on a bit of an ode to how amazing people are and I want you to understand how biased I am against my own better nature and that it isn’t just some saccharine ‘just be kind’ gush because the mood is taking me.

So here goes…

Sometimes, when I’m going about my day, I find myself thinking about the time we went to fetch Honey from the rescue facility or about the sanctuary that took Griffin in, king of all parrots, and I think: ‘Isn’t it marvellous that there are people dedicating their lives to looking after animals?’

Sometimes, I see the soup kitchen adverts down the road from us, or watch as helicopters fly overhead to douse a fire or save someone from the mountain, and I think isn’t it just gobsmacking that there are humans who make it their mission to feed other humans or run towards fire to save other humans and their stuff? Or who will fling themselves out of a flying object to rescue someone who stumbled on a bit of rock?

Isn’t it wonderful?

Sometimes, when I’m going about my day, worrying about my little hopes and dreams, obsessing about whether I am actualised enough, I think about the groups of people volunteering their time to build community spaces in under-resourced areas, about the people who run recovery groups and shelters—for animals, for children, for women, for men—about the people who specialise in vynbos and tardigrades and pangolins and bats and fungi, and those who dedicate their whole lives and all their energy to fossils and geology and engines and the valves of the aorta on the right-side of the heart and toenails and eyelashes and the correct consistency of glue that makes the sticky stuff on Post-It notes sticky enough to stick but not sticky enough to get stuck.

All the things I don’t have to think about because other people are taking care of them.

Isn’t it truly incredible?

Sometimes, I take the moment to appreciate how much I can relax because some studious little fellow (in a non-gender-specific way) somewhere felt compelled to involve themselves in the fine mechanics of retail and distribution so that I can just waltz into a Woolies and buy a potato I didn’t have to farm because some enterprising other little fellow puts up with the risky nature of agriculture, has put their entire generational line into it as a matter of fact.

Sometimes, when I’m going about my day, pushing words around on a page and wondering about the nature of human value and how my next book will enter the world, I know that although I’ll never feel quite worthy enough for this one precious life, I don’t have to worry about making paper or ink or machines or how the book is cut to shape or where to get the boxes to put the books in because there are, right this minute, whole people dedicating their precious lives to this process to the point that there is someone in the world, this *very second*, who gets the greatest thrill considering how to optimise the grease on the steel nut in the disc of the printing machine that will make the process safer and faster and more cost-effective.

It is astonishing.

Somewhere, as I type this, someone’s life is being saved because another person put themselves in harm’s way to do so or because they exchanged hours, weeks, months, years of their one precious life in pursuit of the knowledge that would do so.

Somewhere, as I type this, someone’s heartbreak was eased just a little because they saw a movie that spoke to their grief and allowed them to cry, a movie that took a thousand different people with a thousand different specialities to make.

Somewhere, someone is racing a wounded hamster to a vet that has made it their life’s work to specialise in microsurgery.

Somewhere, someone is being fed and healed and accepted and empowered all because someone else took the time and interest to do so.

It is miraculous.

I firmly believe our opposable thumbs were made to cuddle and care for other animals.

I think about this when my misanthropic tendencies swell in the face of the horrible barrage of news we’re faced with every day; with the nightmares that some humans will rain down on others in the name of their egos, their wounds and fears, their principles, their beliefs...

It helps to remember that the vast majority of humans are not only this. The vast majority are here improving the world for everyone around them, in their time, in their own way.

I think about this and feel so full of love for us. Us conflicted and complex verbal apes who will fall in love and care and tenderly heal even though we are hurting inside, maybe because we are hurting inside. I don’t know about other animals, but our capacity to turn pain into empathy and compassion, to then weave this into care for something outside of ourselves, is magical, transformative.

I can’t help but love it.

Which puts me at great odds with my grumpy side which mostly just wants to hiss and growl and frown and say ‘are you serious right now?!’ when someone drives too fast or too slowly, depending on my given mood, with the same energy I expend on hissing and growling about our world’s worst leaders, as if it’s all the same thing.

So I take these moments of love for humanity.

I remember how people brighten my day and how they’ve served and how they serve my very existence for the best almost every second of every day: the bed I sleep on, the house I live in, the tea I drink, the clean water, the plumbing … people did this. Millions and millions of lives over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, all their passions, urges, instincts, thoughts and feelings, endeavours and investigations have all culminated in my comfort and health.

There are bad things of course. There are plenty of reasons to feed the misanthropic tendencies; to get cynical and mean and angry and hurt.

But, I must occasionally admit – for my own mental health but also because it’s true – that humans are also good and necessary, that both individuals and groups of them can and have changed the course of life for the better. That I don’t mind them so much, not really.

Not really.

As long as I can sit outside and grumble a bit about them from time to time, of course.

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Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash

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