The Stuff We’re Made Of (Jackpot January #10)

It’s only when someone feels their worldview failing that they corner you for an inane conversation about human nature. I hate this conversation more than any other.

People only seem to bring up human nature when they want to prove that things cannot change. Since we live in a cruel world, this often amounts to an assertion that we are cruel by nature; self-interested tyrants locked in a zero-sum game.

We have just as much evidence to suggest that we are kind. People band together following a crisis, as in the Grenfell fire, or set up mutual aid and charity to help their communities. The picture of human nature is complex and we have plenty of scope to change it.

One of the only things we can truly say of ourselves is that we have limits. A kind person can only be kind for so long before they have moments of nastiness. A nasty person cannot maintain the required energy forever, and so their hostility will wilt into kindness.

Once enough years have passed, you begin to think of yourself in terms of the stuff you have. You accumulate so much over a lifetime that you could spend another lifetime sorting through it all and using it all up. We less often stop to truly think of the stuff we’re made of.

I have been told that I’m happy and friendly for most of my life. It’s an accurate reading of how I behave around others and how I feel in private. I just like being in the world. But I have had my moments of darkness, of dead and wasted time, and they have shaped my little thoughts on the nature of things just as much as the lighter moments have.

We are all a mix of things. That much is true (and obvious). But we think of all the things we are as abstract qualities: “I am mostly funny but sometimes sombre” or “mostly quiet but sometimes chatty” or “mostly present but distracted too too often.”

We would do better to think less in terms of proportion and more in terms of quantity. We have only so much patient ‘stuff’ inside of us, until it runs dry and so we must run on frustrated ‘stuff.’ We can only run on angry ‘stuff’ until it melts away, and only tired ‘stuff’ remains. Every feeling is a source of fuel and, even when sleeping, we refuse to run on empty until we die.