What we call human nature, with a cameo from Joshua Boger of the board of fellows of Harvard Medical and Boston's Celebrity Series executive board

Sunday 5/17/26

If a person isn't a good friend, they won't be a good anything of significance in any matters of human significance. Whether that's as a parent, a spouse, a person for others, an artist, or to themselves. Friendship is this term that holds and means all these other things and values. We can't get caught up in the notion that it's merely two people in some kind of platonic dynamic who are agreeable to each other. That's a disservice.

People reading the above will wish to fight over it, which speaks to who they are. We're always trying to cover our asses, paper over our shortcomings, rather than accept and do something about them.

Consider, for example, the "Language is fluid!" people. Well, it's not that fluid actually. You could just learn the basic grammar that a third grade should be able to master. Granted, not the third graders of today's world. But that doesn't mean language is highly fluid. It means people can't accept and work on their failings, and instead try to put the blame somewhere else.

And no, it isn't true that someone who is a good person here is a bad person there. That's not how being a good person works. There's no "leaving off" when you're a good person. You're good. You're good here, you're good there. It doesn't just happen. You make sure you are. Because those are the standards you hold for yourself as a good person.

A bad friend is a bad parent, is a bad spouse, is a bad teacher, is a bad artist, and isn't to themselves what they could be to themselves so that they would make sure to be a good person.

It's human nature to wish to do less. And be less. Being more sounds more daunting. Kind of colossal, right? Overhaul my entire being? No! We're always looking to do less, though, regardless of the task or business at hand. Why? Do we think it'll be too tiring? Too hard? Take too much energy? That we won't be able to do anything else? That it will cut into the time of our doing nothing?

Despite this being human nature, we always feel better when we do the right thing and try harder. Isn't this a remarkable paradox? Maybe it's not human nature. But rather that what is human nature, or should be human nature, is harder to come come by in that we have to actively advance in order to secure our own nature. Have to put that effort in.

What we call human nature is often an unexamined, unvetted cop out. The same as when we say, "Eh, language is fluid!" which translates to, "It ain't me, bub." Or, should I say, "It ain't me, bub, it's you, asshole."

We throw up our arms and declare, "Well, that's human nature!"

Is it?

Someone I've known for thirty years, who has seen millions of words from me, remarked to me some months ago that now that they don't receive email alerts when there's a new entry in this journal, they don't go to the journal. I've rehashed how this works many times, but the gist is is that if someone subscribes and they get more than three email alerts without clicking on the link in one them, then they're unsubscribed without their consent.

I can't control this. It's the host site. But this Many Moments More journal is the single longest work in history. That's a fact. In the entire time we've been here, there is no work longer than this one. Safe to say that each day, there will be something here, right? Thousands of new words.

This person knows me, knows my productivity. In the past, when they got the alerts, they read every entry. They said, "Well, it's human nature not to just go." Meaning, human nature is such that we require the alert email.

Now, is that really human nature? Is that all we are? Because that doesn't seem like human nature to me. That seems like a kind of nonsensical excuse. Doesn't add up. That's not human nature. What are we then, slugs? Is human nature actually slug nature?

Of course it isn't. But we will just apply that wall-covering layer of paint at the earliest rhetorical convenience though, won't we?

Actual human nature instead: this guy has more than anyone ever has, there's likely something new, I'll go check. In this example, it isn't human nature to require an email to do something. Human nature is being interested and using one's mind to go where one wishes to go, check out what one wishes to check out.

Does human nature get more basic than that? "I require an email" isn't human nature. That's taking on the nature of something else. This isn't about this person or email, of course. It's meant to be extrapolated.

We deny ourselves our own nature. Strip ourselves of it. And what does that get us? What's that do for us?

Makes us less human, for one thing. And it makes us unnatural as humans.

Our excuses are like an invasive species that in turn render us invasive species unto ourselves both corrupting our human nature and keeping us at a distance from it. We alter the world around us in kind, to provide for us as humans not living up to their nature; which is to say, living unnaturally.

This isn't tenable. You're trying to build on a form of unnatural order, which can only produce chaos. This becomes like an everyday, end-of-the-world type of construct. What people would call a post-apocalyptic set-up, in which marauders grab what they can from out of this chaos. That's they're time to shine.

The oligarchs are like this. And the billionaires pushing AI. It's their time to sublimate everyone else, who sold out their own human nature. People are unhappy, broken, unfulfilled, but they're also busy denying and lashing out so that they don't have to square up to any personal accountability, or as little as possible. The enemy may also be without, but the enemy is almost always within.

I've never seen anyone regret getting off their ass and going for a long walk or starting a life of fitness or keeping one going. I'm talking about the physical in this instance. I have seen people regret, in one regard, being a good person, and God knows how I live this, at least to date, which is a qualifier I insert pro forma at this point as a way of simply not saying never, as if that wouldn't be good for me, an official conclusion, despite what I already think and fear with what feels like inescapable certainty.

You are made to pay and to hurt, especially in this world, when you are good. You are made to be alone. You will be a great rarity and you won't have others who live up to to a standard you view as acceptable. Note how I didn't say "your" standard, but a standard. A kind of bare minimum of goodness.

But you will feel content within yourself as yourself. You won't have to deal with a personal resentment against yourself. You won't feel like an imposter. You won't have the kind of stress that comes with that.

People who aren't content within themselves as themselves, who have guilt, and/or negative thoughts regarding themselves, causes to doubt what they've done, shame, can't deal with those things. What happens is they change. We can go up, we can go down. They "adapt" by shutting down. By closing up parts of themselves. The counter, if you will, by thinking less, removing the ability to think. To self reflect.

They have to harden. Lights need to go out rather than be put or kept on. They become a kind of walking dead, a kind of thinking dead. Which is to say, entirely unthinking. Rather than introspect, they have to move everything outward. This means deny and attack. That which is denied isn't being turned over at any point as something that may be true. It isn't examined and then deemed, "Nope, that's not accurate, that's not true."

It's categorically rejected. It triggers a fight and flight response. A flight away from truth, via the fight, the lashing out.

These are the people like, say, a Joshua Boger, whom we'll be getting back to soon enough in this record. The people who lash out, whose one technique is to go on the attack because of how wrong they are. How base. How deadened they've made themselves to that which is right. And this can include that which isn't evil. Toxic. Hateful. Things that a Joshua Boger obviously is. But it's many people. It's most people, even when it's not to the same declamatory degree.

These are the people you see attacking. They have to. Because of what they had to do to themselves in order to get away from the truth as to their failings. This is the alternative for them if they're to somehow make it to the finish line of their lives.

This takes all forms. All kinds of rhetoric are employed. The person who is not there for someone in a given relationship will say it's because of priorities in this one, like they're all steadfast and magnanimous, but the person who was would be the good person to all.

They'd find a way. Because there is always a way. And that way doesn't exhaust you or leave you unable to, what, sit on your couch. Rather, it does the opposite. You feel more alive within yourself, because you are more alive.