Bottletop necklaces and chess

You know what’s wild? Other people’s choices. The ridiculous things some people do with their time! Some of them go cold-water swimming at 5 in the morning! Some of them get dressed up as knights and fight each other with pretend swords in suburban parks! There are knitters and bedazzlers and people who make jewellery out of bottle tops or leap from aeroplanes or restore vintage armchairs.

There’s a place near me where people play chess at night. You get to glimpse this lit-up hall full of serious-faced people of all ages staring down at their boards. They seem to be deeply engrossed in their games, you think to yourself, which is lovely. Why don’t you play more chess? Because you’ve never been very good at it. But the thing that appeals about these chess players isn’t so much how they’re playing, but how keen they appear to be on doing it in the first place.

Public Service Announcement: you can choose one thing about other people’s choices: how you react to them. Responding generosity might not be your first instinct, but sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Sometimes other people’s choices can seem embarrassing or annoying or even infuriating. My friend doesn’t drink alcohol but tells nobody. People always want him to justify it. They feel, he tells me, defensive about their own choices when they witness his. But his choice didn’t factor them in at all. It shouldn’t affect them. Same with my vegetarian friends who have people asking them “is it animal cruelty? Is that your reasoning? Because don’t you eat fish? Don’t you eat dairy?” As though they deserve an explanation with an index containing a detailed moral code.

Why do we think we need to pick a side in this way? A friend of mine is a huge fan of Taylor Swift. As soon as she told me, I instantly thought, “Oh no.” Not being a fan of Taylor Swift must mean I’m anti Taylor Swift, right? So I asked her to talk to me into it. She showed me her favourite tracks. Showed me Taylor in a hoodie writing lyrics on her floor. Now, if someone opines about Taylor, I daresay I’ll appear on the pro-Taylor side of the dichotomy. But also: why did I need my friend to justify all this? Because I was defensive about my own lack of position?

Science tells us that people who have experienced trauma tend to experience it a second time when they read or watch something that triggers it. ”So“, said an old friend to me, patiently, when I asked him what the point of trigger warnings was, “is it really that taxing on you to have to see a trigger warning, compared to someone else being catapulted back into the worst moments of their life without warning?” I suddenly didn’t even know why I had thought it was something I needed to have an opinion about. I asked ‘I guess the point is, they might not even be triggered’, I said. My friend looked me dead in the eye. ‘So who’s that hurting?’

Once you notice this habit we all have of choosing a defensive position in relation to someone else’s choices, you see it everywhere. “Why should I call someone ‘they’?” a bloke in a cafe I was in asked his daughter.

The daughter looked over the table at him.

“How hard is that, though, for you, Dad?”

“Well if I get it wrong, I get in trouble for offending someone”, he said. The daughter told him this was untrue. There was no overseeing authority that would shun him after such a blunder. She pointed out that this is just like any other part of human discourse: you might offend someone.

But I realised my own anxiety about such things boils down to not wanting to embarrass myself. People don’t like being shown up. Humans are social animals. We keep each other in check. It’s how we survive.

Surely though, in these instances, we can kick the caveman instinct to the curb and be slightly more generous.

I like Taylor Swift more now. Another person I love adores computer games where people shoot each other. Perhaps I will learn to understand that one day, but in the meantime, watching people do things like genuinely enjoying F1 racing will continue to baffle me, but I’m going to try and think not so much of the event itself, but of the enjoyment. Because everybody deserves that.