The Self-Expressive Animal Called Man

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Before I begin, I warn all and sundry that I am under the weather today. That old grippe is in the air. As I lay in bed this morning, shaking off the remnants of a near-lucid nightmare, I got to thinking. About humanity as a whole, and why we repeat the same actions again and again. I don't mean in terms of history - history is doomed to repeat itself, like an overweight man in the middle of the night after a dozen chili dogs. History is the chili dog. But I'm off on a tangent here. No, I'm speaking of those things I (apparently) do best. Gripe. Whine. Speak out. Shine light on things which give us even a passing moment of anger or unease or shock or that wonderful new emotion brought to us by the internets, Double-U Tee Eff. Why do we do it? Why do we sweat the small stuff? Why do we feel the need to put our feelings out there? Why do we stand on our little boxes beneath our little streetlights and tack up these fliers of personal emotion for all who choose to see? Two reasons. One, we are social creatures. Even I, who often condemn the populace majority for whatever collective defect you'd like to go with today, need people. We have always been a species, since the dawn of humanity, that shares. Once we shared food and huts and animal skins. We shared space and the spoils of the hunt. Now we share our opinions, be they for better or for worse. What's done in bars? Employees, the dumped, the soon-to-be-dumped, the unemployed.... they gather at the watering hole to share their tales of woe. To complete strangers they open up about the cruel boss at work, or that guy that just can't refill the paper tray. Insults are traded regarding the potency of a recent ex, or how they never clipped their toenails, or any manner of small detail. We share. It's in our nature. The second reason is that we are reactionary creatures. We always have been. We react to stimulus, and we react loudly and to as many people as we can reach. On this vast connection of tubes and megabytes and humerous gifs, how else does a human react than in the manner that will reach as many people as possible? Why do you think the blog came about? The blog is the soapbox of the modern world. Something happens, we react, we blog. We are not static creatures, we are not so evolved as to overcome the need to react. And so we read an article or see a website or read a discussion and for some reason it rubs us the wrong way. We react. We reach out. We share. Because we can't just let it go, that's not what being human is all about. We share our anger, our disbelief, our shock, our outrage... And we share our Double-U Tee Eff. Come on, admit it. It's your favorite online emotion, too. ;)