Pritam's Blog
The Curious Case Of Learned Social Behaviors
A certain colleague of mine who is from a different team comes to where our team seats. This lady is extremely jolly and is known to be able to make friends with anyone and everyone. You can hear her enthusiastic voice and cries of excitement from the other end of the office. She is funny and charming. Needless to say that everybody loves her.
So, she comes to our place and wishes everyone good morning in her happy and excited tone. She even hugs one of the girls from our team and they start chit-chatting like they are the best of friends.
This doesn’t seem right to me. Despite knowing the lady, I sense something odd about all these huggings. So, I ask her, the lady if she knows the name of the girl she has been holding hands with.
That look of embarrassment on her face 🤣🤣🤣 I am not going to forget it for a really long time. Seems like she doesn’t know the girl’s name 😁 I wouldn’t call her a hypocrite. Social norms demand us to be polite. And some people just take it to the next level. Sometimes, they embarrass themselves royally in the process of pleasing everyone and maintaining their goody-goody image. They screw up like this lady did…OK, that sounds exactly like hypocrisy.
Anyway, despite having this feeling of not belonging anywhere all through my life, I don’t regret not learning all these social behaviors and culture. In fact, I am socially awkward in a comfortable way. Of course, the above incident is an extreme case but that doesn’t mean I am OK with the normalized, day-to-day hypocrisy that learned social behaviors and culture entail.
Then there is this fun of embarrassing people. Nothing can beat that… 🤓