Unclosed Loops: Why We Remember the Rude Stuff
About this Episode: This is a Raw Memo edition of All Things Human. In the spirit of staying authentic and keeping the conversation moving, I’m skipping the studio polish and the theme music to bring you a thought exactly as it happened.
In this memo:
- The "Type 3" Distraction: Why some public behaviors feel like a "system failure" rather than a simple annoyance.
- Unclosed Loops: The psychological reason why we remember a rude encounter from 15 years ago.
- Shared Scripts: How the lack of explicit rules in public spaces is changing the way we interact with one another.
The Goal of All Things Human: To explore the quiet rules of how we are with each other—even when those rules get broken.
#HumanExperience #PublicEtiquette #RawPodcast #SocialPsychology #HumanBehavior #AllThingsHuman
Transcript
Hey, Adele here.
Speaker:And this one is personal, raw, and completely unpolished.
Speaker:And although I'm talking about the Trevi fountain in Rome, I wanna know, have you
Speaker:had memories that linger like this too?
Speaker:Or is it just me just exploring what it means to be human and
Speaker:what we expect in shared space?
Speaker:Enjoy.
Speaker:So this one's a lot more personal than I usually speak about, and I wanna know
Speaker:if you have had this experience, when you have a memory that lingers in your
Speaker:mind and you don't know why, that on the surface it seems so ridiculous and so
Speaker:petty, you're almost embarrassed to talk about it, but it lingers maybe for years.
Speaker:I'm gonna just give you an example, and maybe you can relate.
Speaker:This occurred almost 20 years ago, and I still remember it.
Speaker:I was in Italy, in Rome at the Trev Fountain.
Speaker:It was a beautiful day.
Speaker:It was really hot.
Speaker:I was there with my husband and we were enjoying ourselves.
Speaker:He stepped away to get something to eat, and I was sitting there and I
Speaker:could hear people right behind me speaking in Chinese, talking about me.
Speaker:They didn't know that I could understand everything they were saying, and they were
Speaker:quite critical of me because they didn't like that I was sitting in front of them.
Speaker:They wanted me to move and this is the TRA fountain.
Speaker:It's crowded.
Speaker:This is high tourist season.
Speaker:It's not like there's a lot of space.
Speaker:And I was there rightfully not in any unusual spot other than I
Speaker:just happened to be there and they happened to be seated behind me,
Speaker:and I guess they didn't like that.
Speaker:This went on for at least 10 minutes.
Speaker:They were talking about what I was wearing, speculating about me, all
Speaker:very critical, and I just sat there pretending like I didn't understand.
Speaker:This was 20 years ago, and I still remember that experience.
Speaker:I wanna know if you've had experiences like this that seem so ridiculously petty.
Speaker:Why did my brain still remember that?
Speaker:And I did some research and I thought I'd share this with you in case you have had
Speaker:moments like this where you don't know why a memory has stuck in your brain.
Speaker:It turns out that we tend to hang on to things if it.
Speaker:Stays like an open loop in our mind that something didn't resolve.
Speaker:And there are certain settings where if you're a sensitive person
Speaker:like me, it may register louder.
Speaker:So for example, most people run into lots of rude situations
Speaker:and they don't last, right?
Speaker:Things happen.
Speaker:But sometimes when something occurs in a setting where you are not
Speaker:allowed or you're, you don't feel like you can do anything about it,
Speaker:you don't have the agency either.
Speaker:You feel like if I were turn around and get in this woman's face, we're
Speaker:gonna have this big altercation in public and I really don't want that.
Speaker:Or it just feels like.
Speaker:You're not empowered or it's not the right setting, or you don't
Speaker:feel you should say anything.
Speaker:That is the thing that lingers when people feel their personal
Speaker:space or the setting has somehow become violated or contaminated.
Speaker:That's what lingers.
Speaker:I happen to be someone who is sensitive to things like shared spaces when
Speaker:it's around art, music, things of meaning, things that feel sacred.
Speaker:And if there's someone doing something like that, it registers more in my body.
Speaker:Especially when it's kind of unclear how something like this would be resolved.
Speaker:You're in public, here's another situation.
Speaker:I was at a performance, the Blue Man group.
Speaker:And if you've ever attended the Blue Man group, there are moments of mime
Speaker:on stage that are just captivating.
Speaker:It's quiet.
Speaker:Mine is silent.
Speaker:And most audiences understand this.
Speaker:You don't have to go around telling everyone to be quiet.
Speaker:They just know and it's truly magical.
Speaker:Well, there was a couple a couple rows behind us that kept talking through
Speaker:the whole performance during mine.
Speaker:And needless to say, I could hear and feel everyone around us getting irritated.
Speaker:A couple people tried to say something and these two people just got snarky back.
Speaker:I'm going to be me and I have a right to say what I wanna say, and
Speaker:you could just feel the tension.
Speaker:That this space, this shared space was being contaminated by a couple
Speaker:people who had a different idea of how we should be in it shared space.
Speaker:And this was uncomfortable because there weren't any ushers around,
Speaker:and it became unclear how are things like this to be resolved.
Speaker:Nobody wants to create a scene.
Speaker:Nobody enjoys confrontation.
Speaker:We're there to have a good time.
Speaker:The people on stage are doing fantastic things, and this is very disruptive.
Speaker:Have you had this kind of experience where no one knows what to say?
Speaker:Should you say something and everyone's getting irritated again?
Speaker:It's what are we expecting from each other in a shared common space?
Speaker:What are our implicit expectations when there's a performance?
Speaker:I think that once upon a time, the expectations were perhaps much clearer
Speaker:for whatever reason, that people just sort of understood, Hey, it's a performance.
Speaker:Maybe it's not a great idea to carry on and talk and laugh
Speaker:throughout the whole thing.
Speaker:And it's not the rudeness that was upsetting.
Speaker:I think what I still remember, this was 15 years ago, these things stay
Speaker:in my mind of feeling unable to speak up, and people did try to speak up
Speaker:and there was a lot of defensive back and forth, and who needs that?
Speaker:What can we reasonably expect of each other when we are in shared common spaces?
Speaker:People have different ideas now of what is acceptable, that
Speaker:perhaps the rules have changed.
Speaker:It's not so much whether it's right or wrong, but.
Speaker:How do we negotiate these things?
Speaker:People have different expectations.
Speaker:This is not about whether something is rude or not.
Speaker:It's more, gosh, what do we do in these situations?
Speaker:And when it's something like that, it's called, from a psychology point
Speaker:of view, it's an unclosed loop.
Speaker:They describe it similar, like if you had something to say.
Speaker:And someone kept interrupting you and you never got to finish.
Speaker:There's a feeling of incompletion in your body and that has meaning for you.
Speaker:The issue is the structure, not really the theme of the irritation.
Speaker:Our implicit social contracts, these violations occur and
Speaker:there's no way to repair them.
Speaker:There's no agency, where's the usher, and everyone's just sitting
Speaker:there gritting their teeth.
Speaker:These are moments when something important breaks and no one knows how to fix it.
Speaker:So I think this is different than the typical annoying, but human
Speaker:stuff, an accidental noise people.
Speaker:Make an effort, you know, baby crying in the back and you
Speaker:know the mom is doing her best.
Speaker:That doesn't seem to upset people nearly as much.
Speaker:Or you're sitting next to someone with a cold and they're coughing or
Speaker:someone drop their phone, and these things don't tend to stay with us.
Speaker:So that's one type of annoyance that just happens from being human.
Speaker:I'll call that type one.
Speaker:Then there's type two.
Speaker:You can tell I thought about these things.
Speaker:There are three types of incidents and how they write to our nervous
Speaker:system and whether or not we remember them 15 years later or not.
Speaker:Type two, I call this the uncontained distraction.
Speaker:So the first one is annoying, but human, you know, someone's doing the best.
Speaker:It's contained type two, these are the uncontained distractions where.
Speaker:Someone has some awareness and there might be a little bit of an ambiguous intent.
Speaker:You don't know if they're really aware that what they're doing is annoying
Speaker:people and it creates some tension, maybe they just don't realize it.
Speaker:It's annoying, but things don't just rupture.
Speaker:So an example of that might be some whispering that doesn't stop.
Speaker:Maybe they didn't realize everyone can hear 'em.
Speaker:Maybe there's some intermittent commentary going on at a movie.
Speaker:So these things, they might be uncomfortable, but your
Speaker:body usually metabolizes them.
Speaker:Type three is what I'm talking about.
Speaker:It's not people trying to contain themselves, people not being
Speaker:aware of what they're doing.
Speaker:Type three is what I call dominating the space.
Speaker:That's when somebody literally overrides everyone else's primary
Speaker:experience with ongoing behavior without much concern for others.
Speaker:I was at a movie once with someone and the movie theater was pretty empty.
Speaker:I think there were maybe 10 people in the whole theater
Speaker:and we were sitting in a row.
Speaker:And then in the next row over was a group of three people.
Speaker:I can't remember the movie now, but what happened was during the whole
Speaker:movie, one person was translating everything of the dialogue of
Speaker:the movie into another language.
Speaker:I guess whoever was with them just didn't speak English.
Speaker:This went on for the whole movie.
Speaker:She was commenting as if nobody else was there.
Speaker:Narrating aloud talking through the whole movie or performance.
Speaker:So that was annoying and there was no usher.
Speaker:And again, we're left with, well do we say anything and whatnot.
Speaker:But there is a difference between accidental disruption and behaving as
Speaker:if the entire space belongs to you.
Speaker:So I'm not talking about noise, I'm talking about dominance of the space.
Speaker:But my main point is that why these moments linger.
Speaker:Maybe you can think of one or two things that seem so petty at on surface, and it's
Speaker:not that there's anything wrong with you.
Speaker:There's no pathological psychological thing that we're carrying a grudge,
Speaker:but the brain doesn't close loops without a resolution if there's
Speaker:no repair to the conclusion.
Speaker:Or you might have felt that your silence didn't mean that you gave consent.
Speaker:There was no accountability, no acknowledgement, no boundary
Speaker:restored, all that stuff.
Speaker:So what stays in the mind isn't the event.
Speaker:It's the unfinished quality of it.
Speaker:Can you relate?
Speaker:It can be something very minor, but it registered in you.
Speaker:For me, it.
Speaker:Is most noticeable because of the way I'm somatically wired.
Speaker:I notice these things when I'm in a setting of, like I said, art, beauty,
Speaker:meaning even if it's a sacredness,
Speaker:I think it's because this feels more common now because we have fewer.
Speaker:Shared scripts.
Speaker:We have fewer universally agreed upon rules.
Speaker:There's more ambiguity in public behavior, and I think people are
Speaker:feeling a higher cost of enforcement.
Speaker:Maybe you're like me, maybe a little bit afraid of escalation,
Speaker:fear of misinterpretation.
Speaker:Oh my God.
Speaker:Now we're gonna get into this nasty shouting match.
Speaker:Who?
Speaker:Who wants that?
Speaker:But it means that.
Speaker:Individuals are left to manage things on their own that you need
Speaker:to manage this collective discomfort and no one knows what that is.
Speaker:There are different defaults now around silence and social space.
Speaker:There's a lack of explicit expectations.
Speaker:Maybe.
Speaker:Maybe they don't hire as many ushers as they used to.
Speaker:Institutions stepping back.
Speaker:Instead of clarifying, even though at the movies now they tell you to
Speaker:turn off your cell phone, guess what?
Speaker:There's always someone who feels like that doesn't apply to them.
Speaker:So it's not so much that pluralism is the problem, it's the unspoken pluralism,
Speaker:and maybe some people just feel this more deeply.
Speaker:I tend to be someone who tracks.
Speaker:Presence, atmosphere and coherence more because I experience art and
Speaker:play somatically and I tend to register these kinds of things as
Speaker:system failures, not annoyances.
Speaker:So this is not about being better or worse, it's more about
Speaker:what you're oriented towards.
Speaker:So if you notice this, it doesn't mean you're fragile.
Speaker:It just means you're tuned in to how a shared space usually works.
Speaker:Now, most people who I've talked to about this have had
Speaker:one or two moments like this.
Speaker:Maybe it was a concert, a trip, a ceremony that never quite settled.
Speaker:So just inviting you to notice what comes up.
Speaker:And today I'm not interested in trying to find a solution or a moral conclusion.
Speaker:This isn't about policing people's behavior, it's just what do we owe each
Speaker:other in spaces that only work if everyone sort of restrain themselves a little
Speaker:bit, is that going to feel restrictive?
Speaker:If this episode stirred something in you, you're not alone.
Speaker:And if it didn't, that's okay too.
Speaker:Not everyone feels something like this, or maybe it wasn't in a shared space setting.
Speaker:Maybe there was something else.
Speaker:But the whole point of this episode is just being curious.
Speaker:Why some moments stay with us and what they reveal about, in this
Speaker:case, shared space and attention, what this reveals about the quiet
Speaker:rules of how we are with each other.
Speaker:That's what was on my mind today.
Speaker:Hope this didn't sound crazy.
Speaker:Hope this sparked something in you as you move forward in exploring
Speaker:this journey of being human.
Speaker:Thanks.
