NOTE: This is a list of what people all seem to do. We could argue about outliers, but barring mental illness, everyone seems to do these things. There are plenty more, but I created this list to prove that we’re not completely unrelated to one another.
Abstractions
- We all perceive stuff, then pull patterns off it to use elsewhere.
- Those patterns reproduce all over our understanding, including in analysis and stories.
- We then convert those abstractions into values and create habitual thoughts around them.
Aesthetics
- We concern ourselves with the function and appearance of things, then assign graded qualities to them.
- We create captured images of reality, repetitive elements like music and poetry, and written or spoken stories.
- This aesthetic bleeds into our sense of identity, and we adorn ourselves with clothing, icons, hair fashions, and piercings that reflect it.
Affection
- We send and receive affection, often as expressions of love.
- We use endearing terms like nicknames and recognize people by their faces.
- When we’ve found someone to share affection with for the rest of our life, we get married, and even societies that treat it like a business transaction still expect them to coexist.
- We constantly redirect that attachment to others towards things that represent human-like traits, as well as to strangers.
Amusement
- We use the leftover time from our work to recreate.
- Our recreation can include imitating reality with games, consuming stories from others, listening or dancing to music, or partaking in play and humor.
Change
- We’re constantly adapting to our environment, to new discoveries, and to social trends, which frequently reflect in our identity and priorities.
- While we can’t easily see these changes minute-by-minute, everyone changes slowly across years and decades.
Comparisons
- We’re perpetually making “like” comparisons to things, from stories to logic.
- Our comparisons express in language as analogies and metaphors.
- Beyond our environment, we also tend to compare ourselves with others, and our relationships with other relationships.
- This often inspires us to compete with others, for work and play.
Conflicts
- We all possess different points of view and opinions, which clash against each other.
- First, they clash against our understanding inside our minds.
- Then, we push against others around us with our beliefs.
- Taken far enough, multiple groups will oppose each other.
Companionship
- We all need friends, even if they’re non-human or merely in our imagination.
- Consuming stories or religious devotion frequently serves as a reliable proxy for friendship.
Conscious/Subconscious
- We’re all ridiculously unaware of most of our thoughts.
- Somewhere in the mix of it, we have a soul that makes decisions.
Decisions
- We all make decisions based on an elaborate calculation that includes managing power and what we love.
- We tend to hand those decisions to more powerful people as we conform to group standards.
Denying Death
- We know we’re going to die, but we don’t talk or think about it routinely.
- We tend to associate diseases with death.
- Generally, our beliefs about diseases and how to live involve extending life or transcending it.
- We always mourn when we experience the death of those we love.
Dreams
- While we sleep, we have dreams.
- Amusingly, science still has no idea why we dream.
- We interpret our dreams as having some meaning to our lives.
Expectations
- We’re constantly looking to the future to predict, expect, and plan and have a mixed hope/fear about it.
- We build traditions with others around consistent patterns.
- We make promises based on our expectations of others and believe people and the surrounding environment will behave a certain way.
- Further, we tend to believe that our expectations are the “best” way, and are suspicious of anything that breaks from it.
Exploration
- Our purposes usually start with a question, since we’re constantly curious about things and willing to take risks enough to find out.
- Most of our purposes involve understanding or creating something never understood or created before.
Expressions
- We use elaborate language to communicate ideas far more complex than our environment.
- Experts of language can direct their image, and everyone else will consider them far more powerful than they are.
- We use the same facial expressions when we feel fear, anger, contempt, disgust, happiness, and surprise.
- We create body language and gestures to emphasize ourselves, often imitating our upbringing.
- We impulsively cry and laugh to exclaim our thoughts.
Faith/Trust
- We have a strong enough belief that we understand the world that we take risks to do things with reality.
- We use these risks to calculate purposes and focus them on creating things that make results.
Feelings
- We experience a vast variety of feelings, which are the same feelings every other human feels, based on a reaction in the brain stem.
- We’re happy when we don’t feel anything is wrong, scared when we don’t feel safe, angry when we feel injustice, sad when we feel loss, and hopeful when we believe something.
- Our feelings are the basis for how we express sympathy and empathy.
Focus
- While we can train ourselves against it, we tend to lock into doing things and forget everything else around us when we’re devoted to a purpose.
- We tend to self-hypnotize over things we believe and tend to let our leaders hypnotize us.
Food
- Everyone loves eating and prefers certain foods, especially sweets.
- We work to constantly improve that experience through cooking.
- We’re accustomed to rituals around mealtime, identify with it, and share the experience with others.
Gender Roles
- Every society demarcates a binary grouping of male and female based on biology.
- They have gender-based social statuses and their own way of behaving, especially when interacting with each other.
- The genders engage together with a complicated dynamic of attraction, attractiveness, and modesty.
- Males and females marry, at least partly out of sexual attraction, with the male often a little older than the female.
Healthcare
- Every society tries to stave off death at varying levels of success.
- As a preventative measure, most people practice hygienic care like brushing teeth or washing hands, which extends to social interaction.
Heat
- We feel an animal association with heat.
- We find tremendous comfort through a hot shower, a cup of coffee, a hot meal, or a warm fire.
- We frequently redirect that pleasure toward physical activity like exercise or dancing.
- We associate that heat socially through a warm handshake or hugging.
Humor
- We all find some things funny.
- Those funny things are a “release valve” that we all need to be happy.
Identity
- We connect ourselves to a self-created image that combines what we understand from our environment with our created results.
- We often manipulate that image of ourselves as our understanding changes.
Image
- We maintain an appearance that’s different from reality.
- We frequently embellish our image by lying, accumulating/flaunting possessions, and false modesty.
- Further, we’ll judge others by our values, expectations, and conceit.
Imagination
- To understand reality, we rebuild it inside our minds.
- Since we’re reproducing a bad copy of reality, we can and do manipulate it.
- While everyone uses it for specific purposes, they also do it for fun.
Logic
- We all construct logical ideas with if/then premises.
- We analyze when we wish to further understand things.
Math/Measuring
- We group values into homogeneous things, then start calculating and predicting with them.
- Beyond presuming that time exists with a past, present, and future, we also evenly divide it for our purposes.
- We do this for distance, time, weight, movement, and increments.
Media
- We gain understanding of ourselves by observing how others do things.
- We use creations to communicate stories with others when we believe it will increase their understanding.
Money
- As a store of power, we always use a currency to track how much we can do or get.
- We treat money as a symbol of raw human power, and we can trade it for what we want.
Morality/Justice
- We all have a notion of right and wrong, which expresses in loving generous people and condemning stingy people.
- Our idea of right and wrong extends into our environment as a desire for fairness, which expresses through strong sentiment as psychological defense mechanisms.
- Our sense of justice is why we desire equivalent exchanges in trading and desire retribution for wrongdoing.
- Generally, people are hospitable until they feel unfairly treated.
- To protect from immorality, society creates taboos.
- Society will often find collective justifications for extremely immoral things like rape or murder.
Pain
- While we all try to avoid it, we experience a wide variety of pain.
- When we get hurt, we suck our wounds.
Power
- We all consider how much power we have compared to others.
- This power dramatically determines the decisions we make.
- The few end up ruling the many as a type of pyramid, which frequently goes corrupt.
Preferences
- We all prefer various foods, entertainment, and work.
- These preferences come from our souls.
- For some reason, most people are right-handed.
Primal/Animal Impulses
- We understand and often perform variations of basic animal reactions, such as hissing, spitting, puffing up in size, and many others.
- We share this primal wiring that we share with most other animals, but we add those feelings together to symbolically connect beyond it to many other things.
Privacy
- We all separate our private life from our public life, even if it’s simply going to the bathroom.
- We typically keep things like sex, marital conflicts, and dysfunction away from strangers.
- We also regularly desire to hide even more things.
Routines/Rituals/Habits
- We automatically build a plethora of subconscious patterns to guide us through repetitive experiences.
- We create daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines around the sun’s rotation, where we do much more in the day and sleep at night.
- Further, we create standardized social greetings among each other.
- We make long-term traditions around anything that repeats, such as marriages, births, deaths, and changing seasons.
- Those traditions usually include feasts and, if they’re a special occasion, a public speech.
Rules
- Whoever has the most power in a group is declared the leadership and makes the rules.
- The rules are generally considered immoral to break, but people still break them and try to hide it.
- The most powerful social structure in a region is a government.
Selfishness
- People frequently receive more than they share, often to manage their power.
- Thus, we tend to neglect common areas when everyone can use it, but nobody is specifically responsible for maintaining.
Shelter
- We all live in a type of domicile to be safe from the elements, which is typically a fixed location but is occasionally a large object we can haul around.
- We express our creativity within and around that structure.
Social Structures
- We have a bias toward our children and family.
- Whenever it fits our purposes toward gaining power or loving others, we’ll work in teams, live together, give and receive gifts, and gossip.
- While we’ll still identify as separate beings, we’ll also identify as part of that group.
- We specialize in roles according to our age, gender, preferences, and talent.
- We give permanent statuses to people in that group for their achievements, which become types of power.
- The group, as a whole, all shares a vague value that separates “in the group” from “outside the group” things and people.
Specializations
- We break off into specialized purposes based on our preferences.
- Those divisions are indefinitely subdivided as more people join the group.
Stories
- We all form our thoughts into narratives with a beginning, middle, and end.
- That end usually implies a value that everyone ought to understand.
- Those stories often take on mythological proportions, folklore, and proverbial statements as facts are obscured.
Substance Habituation
- If we ever use something to the point of excess, we’ll receive a diminishing return from it.
- Frequently, we’ll get drawn into that excess and become addicted.
Supernatural
- We group the “natural” against the “supernatural/subnatural/magic“.
- We tend to establish the unknown as having more power than the known.
- Interaction with the non-natural typically includes divination, special rituals, and music.
- One of the most legitimate reasons we focus on the supernatural is to stop or stall our inevitable death.
Technology
- We combine things together in useful ways to make tools.
- We share how to make those tools with everyone else.
- Over time, we build an ever-growing body of knowledge in our groups.
- Regardless of what society, everyone makes technology around medicine, fighting, and convenience.
- We tend to mistake our creations as “separate” from nature.
Understanding
- We assemble ideas using our memory and perceptions until we believe we know something.
- We must practice repetitively to succeed.
- We use substances and techniques to increase awareness or alter consciousness.
Vagueness
- We don’t generally like vague or uncertain things, especially if they might make us unsafe.
- For the sake of image or avoiding pain from understanding, we often keep things vague inside ourselves.
- This vagueness frequently expresses as general beliefs about fortune or misfortune, especially with predicting the future.
- To avoid vagueness, we explain things to ourselves and others.
Values
- We prioritize some things more than others that make sense to us.
- We assemble those prioritized things into ideas that condense as values.
- We make clear distinctions for many things:
- Colors, shapes, and distance
- Speech versus thought versus action
- Relative locations and directions
- Elements of the world around us, including weather conditions
- Social status
- Our separations start as binary distinctions, then divide further as we gain maturity.
- We form words for every one of these categories as we understand them.
- We tend to imagine everyone else thinks the way we do.
Violence
- Even the most peaceful societies have evil.
- This evil frequently becomes outright fighting and brutality.
- Because of this, every society needs rules for dealing with it.
- Sometimes, for the sake of power, large organizations will fight with one another, which can include war.
Water
- We require water to survive, practice good hygiene, and prepare food.
- Societies very frequently congregate and form around bodies of water.
- We associate water with life.
Youth Love/Hate Relationship
- We give children extra honor and care for their untapped potential, which includes specialized media like music and toys.
- Children have temporary behaviors they lose as they mature, such as pretend play, thumb-sucking, and weaning.
- We usually don’t regard them as adults until they’ve attained some rite of passage.
- The roles from our parenting become the roles we expect from our spouse and self in marriage later.