Without thinking, I said “There’s a place for everyone.” As in: every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.
I’m on Team Nobody Goes Overboard because I believe every human has equal moral value—that’s the axiomatic, “no evidence for it” part. But I don’t just believe that there should be a place for everyone. I also believe that there is a place for everyone, and there’s plenty of evidence for that belief, and there are some unfortunate reasons why not everyone believes it, all of which I present to you now.
A Species of Weirdos
Evolutionary biologists say that humans occupy the “cognitive niche”—we stay alive by using our thinky bits. But the cognitive niche isn’t just one pocket in evolutionary space. It’s an infinite honeycomb of niches, because our brains allows us to customize ourselves in ways that other animals can’t. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian leopard or an alt-right penguin, but humans come in all varieties: some of them like partying on boats, others like painting Warhammer figurines, some think it’s immoral to eat garlic, and others want to live as dogs. (...)
We don’t have a good way of talking about all this diversity because we don’t have good ways of categorizing people. But here’s one way of looking at it. According to an analysis by my friends Slime Mold Time Mold, if human minds differ from each other in even 100 ways—which is not that many!—and those differences are normally distributed, then 99% of people are extreme in at least one way. Which is to say: statistically, everyone is special.
That’s just looking at traits, which we might assume are more nature than nurture. People’s experiences specialize them even further—two equally conscientious people can end up obsessed with locomotives or Zen gardening, depending on where they grow up, what classes they happen to take, who they date, and whether, at a critical moment in their development, they watched the scene in Spiderman 2 (2004) where Tobey Maguire stops a runaway train.
Stop Pushing Paper, Start Pushing People
Our abundance of weirdos creates diversity not only in supply, but also in demand. All those odd people want odd things, creating odd jobs for other odd people to fill. Here are just a few of them:
- Professional bridesmaid
- Person who crams people into crowded subway cars
- Underwater pizza delivery guy
- Dog chef
- Trash detective
- Teeth designer
- Fire watcher
- Bovine reproductive technician
And that’s just thinking of niches in the dumbest sense possible, which is “things you can do in exchange for money.” People’s needs are so dire and so diverse that there are niches upon niches crying out for someone to fill them.
In high school, my sister was the Breakup Whisperer. Even her most distant acquaintances would seek her counsel on ending their relationships, or her comfort when those relationships had been ended for them. (“Breakup Whisperer” sounds better than “Dump Consultant”.) Although her paycheck at the time said “Subway Sandwich Artist,” the real place she fit was on our front porch, trying to talk a 16-year-old boy through his first emotions.
We need a whole lot more than just Breakup Whisperers. We need D&D Group Conveners, Last-Minute Babysitters, People Who Write Articles Online Explaining The Confusing Endings of Certain Movies, A Cappella Concert Attendees, Wikipedia Editors, Phone Fixers, Local Historians, Post-Tragedy Casserole Providers, Yelp Reviewers, Field Trip Chaperones, and on and on, forever. Roll a few of those together, and baby, that’s a niche.
Flaming Chickens
If there’s an abundance of niches, why does it seem like so many people fail to find theirs?
Three reasons. The first: most niches are local, and that isn’t where people look.
When I grew up, everybody was talking about “globalization,” which always seemed to be about how we can get Tamagotchis from Shanghai to Scranton in 24 hours or whatever. Maybe I missed this because I was, like, eight, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning the globalization of attention. We can move electrons even faster than we can move Tamagotchis, and the result is that everyone from Shanghai to Scranton is largely looking at, listening to, and talking about the same things. You can see this in the demise of local news, the consolidation of the internet, and all other forms of oligopoly.
The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected. If everyone’s trying to be an Instagram relationship advice influencer, nobody’s trying to be their friendly neighborhood Breakup Whisperer. Plus, everybody, no matter how much of a nobody they are, has at least a few people who are counting on them, whose lives they can ruin or enrich, and it’s hard to do much enriching when you’re fretting full-time about who’s gonna be the next president.
Local niches are important because they can pack a lot of meaning into a tiny space; they make it so that more people can matter. When I was thirteen, I got promoted to moderator of the “Flaming Chickens” forum of a Yu-Gi-Oh! message board, which is where people were allowed to “flame” things that they hated (stepdads, math class, low-quality English dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes). I was so excited because it meant I meant something. Was the job pointless? Yes. Was it not a “job” at all in the sense that it paid nothing? Yes. Did the forum eventually die because of an infidelity scandal inside the polycule of people who ran the message board? Also yes. But for a bit, I fit.
The Tragedy of Nicky
The second reason why people end up without a niche: we act like finding one is personal, private, and painless. It’s not.
If you’re trying to figure out which car to buy, which person to date, or which taco place to try, there’s are whole industries waiting to assist you. But if you want to figure out where you fit in, you’re on your own. The education system won’t let you leave until you can add, subtract, read, and write, but they’ll give you a diploma even if you have no clue who you are or what you want.
We assume that everyone falls into the right slot just by knocking around the world like a human-sized Plinko chip. But niches can be tiny, peculiar, and hidden away, and there’s no guarantee you’ll find yours without a heave or a shove.
I once ran into an old classmate—let’s call her Nicky—who was trying to choose between competing offers from consulting firms. Nicky was having a hard time, and it soon became clear why: she didn’t want to be a consultant at all. “What do you like to do?” I asked. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t know.” For her, consulting was the default option, an industry willing to take someone with brains and grit but no particular interests, and at the end of college she was surprised to find that was her.
That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.
When people fail to find their niche, and when we fail to help them find it, we don’t just suffer from their absence. We also suffer from their presence in the wrong place. People often end up doing awful things because they never figured out what else to do. Nobody is born with a hankering to build prisons or raid pensions or market vapes to kids—their Plinko chips got jammed in an evil slot because they never landed in a good one.
That’s why “where do I fit in?” is not a private question, like the password to your bank account or the color of your underwear. We all have a stake in you finding your place, because we’re all better off when you like your life. Well-slotted people make good neighbors, bosses, partners, and parents. Unmoored, detached, disaffected people end up trying to figure out whether 10-year-olds prefer vapes that taste like cotton candy or blue raspberry.
Plenty of Openings on the Millet Farm
The third reason is the opposite of the second: some people think that finding your place is impossible.
by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Image: author's father
