simont | (no subject)

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A friend visited me the other week and left a pack of chewing gum in my living room, which I've been trying to give back.

This got me thinking.

I don't chew gum. I've never chewed gum in my life; to be honest, I have no idea what people get out of chewing gum. Which is not to say I have a strong opinion that it's a pointless exercise; I don't doubt that there is something to be got out of it. I just don't happen to know what it is.

So if I'm perfectly willing to concede that there's probably some reason why chewing gum is a pleasant thing to do, why have I never had an urge to try it?

It seems to me that there's a certain class of activities which I might perfectly well find pleasant if I tried them, but which I feel no particular urge to try. I think they're things which I've encountered in such a way that my brain pegged them as Things That Happen To Other People. I feel no obvious hole in my life which would be filled by a piece of chewing gum in my mouth, and it's just never seemed worth the effort to go and chew on one anyway to see if I discover that the hole has been there but unnoticed.

Smoking, I now think, is another such thing. I've always believed that I never took up smoking because I was exempt from the peer pressure at school; I was part of the hard-core out-crowd which no amount of deliberate conformity could have made cool, and therefore nobody had any interest in pressuring me to start. This viewpoint has come under some fire recently as I began to acquire friends who smoked, and discovered that in fact most of them didn't start due to peer pressure at school, but instead took up the habit as responsible adults while under no more pressure than ‘hey, that looks fun, let's have a go’. And it would never have occurred to me to start smoking for a reason like that. It's not that I consciously decided not to because it's expensive, addictive and dangerous (although I might well have if I'd actually thought about it); I never really took the conscious decision at all. Smoking has always just been something that some people feel a desire to do, and I don't.

Come to think of it, I think I have much the same attitude to believing in God. I first encountered religious people in one of my numerous primary schools at age eight, and after my first serious communications failure something clicked in my mind and I thought ‘Oh yes, now I remember reading about this God who some people believe in, this must be one of those people’. I don't think I had any real concept at the time of wondering who was right, and I certainly didn't start considering whether to begin believing in God myself; I just registered that the person I was talking to subscribed to a lifestyle choice which people like me didn't, engaged tolerance-of-differences mode, and left it at that.

I wonder what distinguishes this class of activities. I don't respond like this to everything that people-who-aren't-me do. Some people go skiing, for example, and I've never been but I'd quite like to some day to see if it's as much fun as it sounds. That isn't a thing-other-people-do, for me: it's a thing I just haven't got round to doing yet (this categorisation is unaffected by the fact that I might never actually get round to doing it). And it too is expensive, dangerous and could be metaphorically addictive; so what's the fundamental difference between skiing and smoking that makes me think I'd like to try one while I've never so much as considered taking up the other?

I wonder if this distinction is something that only makes sense in my own head. Do other people see a category of activities which other people seem to enjoy doing but which it would never occur to them to try themselves? Or is it just me?

(Another thing that this has got me thinking is that I must be pretty bored if the sight of a pack of chewing gum can inspire profound philosophy!)

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I didn't chew gum for years, mostly because my parents thought it was 'dirty' and also threatened that if I swallowed it, it would tie knots in my stomach. I love the way parents tell their kids these sort of outrageous lies!

Anyway, I chew it now because
a) blowing bubbles is fun
b) I like the minty taste but hate the chalkiness of polos and extra-strongs
c) It's good for my teeth.

I’ve seen it suggested that if you chew more as a child (say, with chewing gum) then your mouth grows larger, and you are less likely to have problems with wisdom teeth in later life.

I chew it as a fidget object at work. I often need to fidget in some way or other to stop being distracted, and chewing gum is somewhat more acceptable than chewing coffee stirrers, and it won't make me chubby like proper food.

Exactly. If you've got a brain that will divert need-to-fidget from fingers to mouth, gum is an excellent fiddle object. So are cigarettes for that matter, especially if you roll your own.

Yes, I have such a category. It includes smoking and chewing gum; also (for many years) riding bicycles.

I reckon, if you can find something profound in something mundane, then you must be looking at the world in the right way. Or *a* right way, at least.

I think I tend to form an opinion on whether I should or shouldn't try any new activity I find out about... I don't have a 'neutral' category of things which I don't consider trying.

I used to have a motto to live by, "I'll try anything twice", but then I started running a fetish site and decided that actually that was a little too all-encompassing... there are some activities that I have no wish to try before deciding I'm disinterested in them! :) But I do tend to feel an (often quite strong) inclination to try anything which doesn't initially repulse me, just to see if I like it or not, and how much.

ObGum:
I only started chewing gum a few years ago, when I was taking a lot of stimulants - it's a common way to prevent damaging your teeth by grinding them while under the influence. I stopped chewing gum when I stopped taking stimulants last year, and don't miss it - I only ever did it for a very specific reason. I suppose I can see a point to using gum as a backup breath freshener, other than that it seems fairly tedious to me...

It sort of makes sense to me, although the things falling into each category seem entirely different from yours. E.g. I've deliberately tried chewing gum, smoking and religious belief to a small extent in the past (and been unimpressed); however, I've never felt the slightest motivation to take up any sort of sport for entertainment (though I sometimes participate in exercise for health reasons) - it's just Not The Sort Of Thing I Do.

When I was a child or young teenager there was a much wider set of Things Other People Did e.g. watching soap operas, reading magazines, paying attention to pop music, wearing make-up, talking about MOTAS, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee, smoking, sitting in cafes, going out to pubs/clubs/gigs/parties... These were things I did not do and was determined not to do, since they were things approved of by people I disliked and who disliked me - a sort of inverse peer pressure. Eventually I got past this b/w division of activities, and tried most of them at least once :-)

mmm i know what you mean, though i can't remember any of my own atm....

Re gum:

I chew (sugar free) gum mainly for my teeth as a toothpast substitute in the middle of the day and a generally feel fresher and cleaner thing, but also as mint substitute. Whilst I really dont' see the point in sugary gum (ie why not have an actual sweet) if you've seen me and a packet of mints and the rapid death of the packet of mints, you can see why I should have the long lasting sugar free gum variety... :)

xxxxx

THere are all sorts of things I don't want to try; drugs, for example, on the grounds that I'm aware they can have very negative effects. Possibly you're the same about smoking.

As for skiing, the snowdome at Milton Keynes is quite fun, I might be persuadable to organise a trip to a beginners' lesson sometime :)

I think I might be the same about smoking now, since my preconceptions have been challenged enough to make me actually think about why I don't do it. (In particular, a former colleague of mine actually recommended to me once that I should take up smoking, and once I'd got over the surprise that it was something anyone would seriously encourage, it did at least cause me to stop and realise I'd never even considered it up until now.)

And I definitely know I don't want to smoke dope, because the time I got passively stoned was enough to convince me I simply don't enjoy it.

Snowdome: ooh, that sounds like a nice idea. A major reason I feared I might never get round to trying skiing is because people tend to do it by travelling to strange bits of Europe for a week and that sounds like a lot of effort for something I don't know I'll enjoy. A convenient way to give it a try for only two hours' driving might be just the thing.

I have done dry slope skiing, and it is quite fun, even if you are a total wimp like me.

The snowdome isn't dry slope skiing though - it's a real snow slope, indoors.

They sometimes leave big piles of snow outide of the back doors in summer, which makes for really unexpected snowball fights.

The snowdome is great, I've been snowboarding there a few times. I've been contemplating learning to ski as I got fed up of falling on my arse...

The time I tried smoking cigars I woke up the next morning with a mouth tasting like an ashtray, which put me right off the whole thing. It didn't do anything positive that I noticed either.

I tried a cigar once and a cigarette once. I could see the point of the former, supposing you ignored the lung cancer, crappy effects on other people, being a social pariah, etc, but couldn't understand what the attraction of the latter was at all.

"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."

I didn't chew gum much as a child - my parents didn't like the habit and I had a limited amount of pocket money. My dentist, however, was all in favour of my chewing sugar-free gum, on the grounds that I could do with stronger jaw muscles. Ironically, because of sugar-free gum containing aspartame, I now won't chew that at all because of the headaches I get. One of my friends chewed gum, so I did for a while, but stopped, as it made me hungry without giving me the ability to gain the calories I felt I needed as a result of chewing it.

I find it interesting that you register religion as a lifestyle choice. One part of me says you're absolutely right, and the other part of me says you're not. If you're brought up religious, it can be seriously bound into your worldview in a way that a lifestyle choice isn't. I mean, for me, practising Catholicism or not is a lifestyle choice, but deep down, I have a whole spectrum of thought that is specifically defined by its agreement or otherwise with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Catholic teaching of minors has an uncomfortable amount in common with what Nazis did to children.

Things-other-people-do. That's interesting. I think having tattoos or piercings is something other people do. I have no interest in this. This may just be because I'm a bit of a wimp. Taking hard drugs is also in the t-o-p-d category, but that's because I'm quite fond of my mind, my life and not being in jail. Otherwise, for most common things, I'm probably prepared to try it. And then decide that I was right after all, and didn't want to do it really.

I find it interesting that you register religion as a lifestyle choice. One part of me says you're absolutely right, and the other part of me says you're not. If you're brought up religious, it can be seriously bound into your worldview in a way that a lifestyle choice isn't.

I think this is approaching being precisely my point, in fact. It's entirely possible, and a major thrust of my speculation on this subject, that the main reason that (say) smoking falls into the things-other-people-do category for me is because my extended family and their friends have all always been non-smokers, and hence I grew up with a basic ingrained attitude that said smoking was something done by people on TV and not real people. This was, as you put it, "bound into my worldview" in a way that remained unshaken by starting to meet people who did it in real life. In precisely the same way, being brought up in an entirely atheist family and social group caused me not to even consider the possible existence of God until I started reading theologically inclined fiction and having secondary-school lessons which encouraged us to give it serious thought.

Perhaps smoking is something you can genuinely choose, whereas (one of) belief or disbelief in God is a conclusion you find yourself inevitably drawn to once you sit down and think about it seriously. But in either case, the common element is that as things-other-people-do they were things that for a long time it never even occurred to me to sit down and think about seriously.

Actually, I find it rather more interesting that you consider religion as something which people actually sit down and think about. Whilst I suspect that a lot of the people reading this (myself included) are the kind of people who actually would want to have a careful justification for their religious position, the fact that the vast majority of the world follows (or at least claims to adhere to) the same religion as their parents tends to indicate fairly strongly otherwise.

Of course, the fact that this statistic also applies to my own smugly-enlightened atheism is something I'm not sure I could argue my way out of. I'd like to believe that my considerations of the issue have a fair degree of logic to them, but proving that it's not just worthless self-justification is non-trivial.

Hmm. I don't think I intended to suggest that everybody sat down and thought seriously about religion: only that some people eventually do, and people who haven't (or haven't yet) will tend to follow the religion in which they were raised because it's never occurred to them to consider alternatives. I'm not sure this contradicts you.

You too! There is another who walks into newsagents and can't drink anything in the fridge!

I used to chew chewing gum when I was smaller and starting to learn algebra, because if I distracted my mouth I found my brain went clearer, and too many pencils died in horrible ways. I'm not sure why I stopped chewing gum, possibly because the more I started carrying bags around and buying my own shoes, the more I noticed gum on the floor, and my brain made some sort of link, gum=floorstuff. Either way I can't think about gum now without thinking "eew".

Smoking I always found disgusting, because my parents did it and they smelled bad.

Religion, now, people used to keep trying to get me to believe in God but I decided that if there was a God I wasn't going to be nice to the bastard and if there wasn't it would be less effort, so to me believing in God is very consciously a thing that other people do and I don't. And just...the more I think now of there being a god the more silly the concept sounds, for some reason I don't know. I tried going to church for a couple of weeks when I was sixteen just to see what it was like, and I couldn't go for a third week because I'd been so close to laughing out loud the second week, which would obviously have been a very disrespectful thing for the people there who did believe it.

Most of the things I register as "other people do this not me" are because either my liver, my legs, my bank account or my brain will break if I do them. I can't think of any single thing for which I haven't thought "I wonder if I could do that".

gum=floorstuff

I just don't understand the mentality of anyone who would drop chewing gum on the floor (or stick it underneath a table, or whatever). They might as well be aliens.

I don't understand people who drop litter either.

No, I hate the dropping litter thing. I chew gum but am always very careful to make sure it goes into a bin and not into the floor. I think the people who spit their gum onto the pavement are the same people who go around spitting in the street anyway (i.e. the ones who can't walk without drooling for some unappetising reason).

People are lazy and think that the world disappears when they personally can't see it. This theory is called "The magic place called Away".

Any place the subject can't see contains a wormhole that leads to a magical place called Away. Such wormholes are to be found on the road behind the subject's car, on the ground under the subject's feet, in any place the subject is about to walk away from (or, in a cunning twist of relativity, in any place that is about to move away from the subject, such as public transport), and at the bottom of everything that looks like a bin.

This is why believers in Away persist in throwing cigarette ends at cyclists, stacking rubbish in a bin that is obviously full and needs emptying, and never clean out the bottom of their own household bin even when something really hideous has leaked through the bag.

Recent hypotheses indicate there may also be wormholes to Away hidden under tables and chairs; this is inferred by the rarity of non-believers bashing their knees on the table. Thus chewing gum can be safely sent to Away by sticking it underneath a table in the same place that knees are supposed to go.

The general belief as to what happens to the rubbish once it reaches Away is a little vague; since it appears to be able to swallow such objects as cars and washing machines (and even, in the case of governments composed entirely of believers, buildings), many believe that Away is a parallel universe that was once right and varied, but all matter converged and it is now only inhabited by one large black hole.

There is some supporting evidence for this:

Our own universe may be an 'Away' for other universes less far along the chain of universe evolution; this explains the appearance for no reason of strange smells and the occasional discovery of plant species once thought extinct
The noise purported to be made by wood pigeons, which is often heard when there are no wood pigeons to be seen, and that funny noise made by machinery when you've oiled and cleaned every single bloody bit, may be manifestations of the Hawking radiation thrown out by the giant black hole in Away.

This last point is mildly worrying; if the Hawking radiation can make its way into this universe (albeit changing completely in nature from electromagnetic to acoustic radiation as it does so), would it then be possible for the objects sent to Away from this universe to one day come back as a solid wall of noise lasting hundreds if not thousands of years?

Okay, make that two corrections:
1) For "right and varied" substitute "rich and varied"
2) Acoustic waves are not really rays. D'oh.

Well, there's nothing to stop you trying it. Unlike smoking, chewing gum is not addictive, does not harm people around you, and at worst makes you look a bit silly. Some dentists claim chewing gum can be beneficial for your health, too.

Though, I suppose, part of the gum chewing thing has to do with the taste of the gum, which is something that is going to be different for you.

Anyway, to both relieve the boredom and further the philosophy lecture, why not try a stick?

does not harm people around you

I see you aren't counting the way it pollutes the environment when it winds up on pavements and under desks and chairs... I think this is what makes chewing gum seem so disgusting to me -- after years of encounters with other people's discards stuck to bits of furniture at school it's really not something I want to put in my mouth. And the whole idea of a piece of confectionery which you can't actually eat is just weird too. If you want something chewy, how about toffee?

Driving is my main 'thing that other people do'. I suspect that this is because neither of my parents drive. As a child, cars were these metal boxes that you had to avoid when you crossed the road, that you saw from the windows of buses and that occasionally you would sit in and vomit. The thought of *me* being in control of one is just ludicrous, though there's nothing strange about my friends being so.

That's interesting. For me, skiing is a thing-other-people-do. I'd not really considered that I might. Downhill skiing, anyway; the prospect of living in rural Ohio has made me wonder if cross-country skiing would be a useful winter skill.

I think I've taken a deliberate action on anything I've considered enough to notice it exists. Of course, if this is not the case, I can't tell, because I can't think of anything I've not thought about (if you see what i mean). For instance, I have always thought I would find smoking too addictive, although I did try it once (Adrian smokes occasionally) and it made me cough for about 5 minutes and completely decreased my tolerence of others smoking for a few days. So I think that was my first and last drag. Other things (recreational drugs, alcohol, dangerous sports etc.) get considered and slotted into a: I will try that as soon as the oppertunity presents itself, b: I might try it, but I'm in no rush to, and c: there is nothing on the planet that would get me to try that (hard drugs and bungee jumping fit this category ;-) )

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