Thread by @EpistemicHope

A realization that probably is obvious to people who are more savvy than me:

For most people, a lot of behavior is motivated, not on the basis of the merits of the behavior, but because it provides a template for social engagement.

I'm in Las Vegas for a conference today. I was wandering around the casino in which the conference is being hosted, and watching the people.

I was poking around in gift shop and saw two women looking through the clothes.

Now personally, I dislike clothes shopping. There's some kind of sensory-overload thing about it, for me, and I find it particularly exhausting.

But even if I liked clothes shopping, a _casino giftshop_ seems like a pitiful place to do it.

How could that be fun?

But I think that this is missing the point.

My _guess_ is that those women weren't really getting value from the shopping per se.

The important thing is that "shopping is something that girlfriends do together."

It's a sort of template, or scaffolding, available from the ambient culture, that facilitates social interaction.

It's pretty hard to figure out how to connect with others or feel a sense of belonging from scratch (as I know personally!).

But you know from TV that this is a thing that girlfriends do together, and so does your girlfriend. It becomes a schelling activity.

I bet a lot of things are like that. Talking about how cute boys are, for instance.

https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1386539630254727170?s=20

And to avoid picking on the characteristic activities of _only_ the fairer sex:

Watching sports is also largely a template for social engagement.

(But that one is more obvious from casual observation. People literally wear shirts with their group affiliation written on them!)

I realized when I was ~20 that flowers don't smell good to me. Mostly, they smell like...musky dust?

But up until that point, I had always taken a big whiff of bouquet, when one was proffered, and smiled, because that is what one did with flowers.

Similarly, I bet there are loads people who have never paused to reflect on if they actually like football, and if they might prefer to bond with their friends over some other activity.

For that matter, religion is obviously this for a lot of people.

I have a stereotype of a middle aged woman who doesn't actually believe-in-the-sense-of-having-anticipations in God, or even particularly like anything about church. But she's very religious because that is the scaffolding for her having friends.

She would be lost, and isolated, and disoriented, without church-going-Christianity as a macro-script for her life.

It isn't even that she's getting much _meaning_ from religion. She doesn't _really_ believe, after all.

It gives her _structure_.

I don't want to malign these activities as merely farces. I'm sure that there are people that enjoy shopping, and sports, on the merits, independently from their value for social facilitation. And there are obviously people who really do derive meaning from religion.

But also, the way normal people act makes a lot more sense to me if I imagine that they're mostly trying to feel belonging, and the actual content of their activity is more-or-less epiphenomenal.

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