The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners

We should remember – along the way – how little anyone ever thinks of us, in the best possible sense. People are for the most part gloriously indifferent to each other. They don’t spend their time plotting and hating; they simply don’t care. The person cracking a joke with a group of friends has not rerouted their evening to mock us. The attractive individual deep in conversation with a companion isn’t speculating about how isolated and ugly we are. Those are voices in our heads, not theirs.

This lack of faith in the humanity of others is a natural tendency of our minds. We go by external cues – and therefore come to assume that we are living among superior, metal-plated cyborgs rather than fragile, water-filled uncertain entities. We cannot believe that most of what we know of our own minds, especially the self-doubt, the anxiety and the sadness, exists in strangers too.

there is simply nothing we can do other than fall silent and absorb our failure and the mismatch between who we are and the direction of the universe.

We should risk doing what we at heart have always longed to do: to reveal some of the fear, sadness and angst we genuinely feel to those who seem to care about us. We will be helped in our pain, we will remind others of their capacities – and, if we are fortunate, we’ll set a precedent that means that others will one day bring a few of their problems to us in turn.

As pitying people, we may feel very bad for our companion, but we also know – and imply – that we haven’t been there, and realistically never will. Pity is what a medieval monarch would have felt for a gangrenous peasant, or what the most popular and attractive person at school might feel for the acned nerd.
Sympathy, on the other hand, implicates a witness in tune to the suffering of another: their pain has been, currently is or could one day very plausibly be our own. We extend our kindness knowing that we are exposed to comparable misfortunes. We are the superiors of those we pity, but the committed equals of those we sympathise with.

There is a sad background to the people-pleasing adult who doesn’t in the end even please so much. They are generally the outcome of a style of parenting that didn’t allow character or originality to show through. They had to hide who they really were for fear of upsetting an angry or vulnerable set of caregivers.

The good guest combines the candour of the child with the social empathy of the self-aware adult. They know how to be that rare and much prized social phenomenon: a loveable eccentric.

What truly charms is the person who manages to possess both a character and politeness. The archetype for this is the endearing four-and-a-half year old child. They’ll tell a near stranger their ideas about where squirrels go at night, what they like to put in their sandwiches and their nickname for their elderly grandfather. We colloquially call this ‘cute’ but it’s perhaps something more serious than this implies: more pointedly, it’s a relief from the customary pressure to standardise human nature and to say nothing that will sound too odd or flavoured. The small child is reminding us that the variegated surface of every personality – theirs, but by implication ours as well – could be put on display and, rather than hurt or offend, simply charm and enliven.

To be a good companion, it isn’t enough simply to be polite or to commiserate. We need to take a risk. We need to give our friends something they could use against us – so that they can feel safe in giving us something we might use against them. Under the umbrella of mutually assured destruction, real trust and friendship can flourish.

The underlying idea is that in order to demonstrate our position as an empathetic receiver of confidences, we have to show our broken and flawed sides: we’ve failed, so another can tell us of their failure; we’ve been hurt, so they can admit to being hurt; we’ve done, and admitted we’ve done, very stupid things so we’re not going to turn against those who have also been at points very silly.