On Failing to be a Human Being

What kind of difficult people do you face most often? Since Professor of Organizational Behaviour Robert Sutton wrote his book The No A-hole Rule in 2007 about how to build workplaces devoid of soul-sucking jerks who make others feel oppressed, demeaned, disrespected, or de-energized, he has been inundated with more than 8000 emails requesting personalised advice on how to deal the a-holes the senders have had to face during the course of their work. Some cocktail of individual psychology and structural incentives seem to contribute to a-holic behaviour. Sutton notes that ‘treating others like dirt and being selfish can […] help people triumph in pure “I win, you lose” situations—when there is no incentive to cooperate with others now or in the future.’ Such people do so to defeat competitors and lure sycophantic yes-men to their side. So Sutton decided to write a follow-up book, The A-hole Survival Guide (2017) which offers his research-backed advice on how non-a-holes can deal with them.       

This is the kind of book title that catches your attention in a bookstore. It caught mine at a Waterstones in York two years ago. But I only just got around to reading it. Beyond the laugh out loud descriptions of a-holic behaviour, there’s great advice in the book worth summarising and discussing, hence this post. To be sure, Sutton’s contribution is hardly the first on navigating the jungle of workplace politics and culture. If you’re a regular reader of this website (first, thank you!) you’d note that Adam Grant’s Give and Take already lays out the case for being a giver at work, how to become one and how to gain distinct advantages over a-holes (i.e., takers). A laundry list of successful people attest to the value of not being an a-hole, including ‘Apple CEO Tim Cook, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Berkshire Hathaway CEO and investment icon Warren Buffett, the late comedian and actor Robin Williams, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, television producer Jenji Kohan, and executive producer and writer Shonda Rhimes.’

Unfortunately, some takers or a-holes can and do succeed precisely because they employ a-holic behaviours. Sutton, however, argues, quite appropriately, that ‘treating others like dirt [nevertheless] does so much damage that even if you are a winner and an asshole, you are still a loser [read: failure] as a human being in my book.’ I agree, hence the title of this introduction. Countless evidence demonstrates how a-holic behaviours negatively affect everyone’s performance. It’s contagious and damages the mental and physical health of people for a long time, sometimes stretching from childhood all the way into adulthood. Children who are bullied at the hands of disagreeable takers suffer from ‘higher arrest rates, financial struggles, depression, and heavy smoking.’

A 2012 study documented how such shit rolled downhill: abusive senior leaders were prone to selecting or breeding abusive team leaders, who in turn, ignited destructive conflict in their teams, which stifled team members’ creativity.

Robert Sutton

Not only is the damage psychological and physical, triggering a host of issues like depression, heart disease, and premature death among victims, it’s also costly. It is estimated that a-holic supervision costs American companies 23.8 billion annually. Hence, Sutton intends to help readers suffering from a-holes ‘defend themselves and [their] friends, colleagues, customers, teams, and organizations that [they] hold dear from these mean-spirited people and their vile words and deeds.’ Before we get to the advice proper, let us first touch on the issue of self-awareness. It is telling that while more than half among those polled by the Workplace Bullying Institute reported that they have had to deal with a-holes in the course of their work, less than 1 percent of them admitted that they themselves acted as a-holes toward others.

One explanation of the above discrepancy includes the fact that many people are not self-aware: they perceive slights in the harmless words and actions of others and are blind to the times that they have caused others to feel disrespected or demeaned. We are subject to cognitive biases that often cause us to ignore our shortcomings and inflate our strengths. Therefore, even when we have acted like an a-hole toward others, we are not likely to admit it, even to ourselves, and might find ad hoc justifications for it as exceptions to the rule. Another explanation has to do with the diversity of temperament. People have different thresholds for a-holism. Words and actions that leave one person down in the dumps could have no effect on someone else or maybe even be perceived as praise. Context matters too:

For example, a former U.S. National Football League player pointed out to me that, after a great play in a game, slapping a teammate on the head or butt and calling him “one bad motherfucker” is high praise on the field—but that kind of aggressive behavior can get you fired or arrested elsewhere.

Robert Sutton

Initial solutions to the above problem of our lack of self-awareness include being slow to attribute a-holic intent to others, considering positive interpretations of the offender’s words and deeds instead, and seeing ourselves as part of the problem. Many factors contribute to how we react to other people’s behaviour, like our life experiences and background. Knowing what these factors are will help us take responsibility for our feelings and master them. More on this later. First, here are the five diagnostic questions you can use to determine whether you are dealing with an a-hole problem and if you should do something about it.  

The Five Diagnostic Questions

1. Is the alleged a-hole treating you and others like dirt for a brief period or for much longer? If brief, it can probably be ignored. If longer, then it’s time to start thinking about what to do.
2. Are you dealing with a situational or authentic a-hole? If the former, you can let it pass, or else give constructive feedback so that the person can change. If the latter, then more care has to be taken to deal with the problem.
3. Is it a problem with one person or the whole company? If you are dealing with just one or two a-holes, then as long as you can surround yourself with allies, you should be able to find safety. If you are living in a-hole central – which can be quite common because nastiness is contagious – you’ll need to find ways to get out ASAP, much like Chris Washington needed to in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out. Because of the similarity-attraction effect, birds of a feather flock together. A-holes attract and breed other a-holes. We can get sucked in too.
4. How much more leverage do you have over the a-holes? If you’ve got lots of power over them, you’re set. You can call them out on their BS, reform them or else fire them without much incident. Overconfidence, however, is a very real human flaw. Fighting a-holes puts you at risk – especially since a-holes tend to be vindictive – and should only be done if you are very sure that you have reliable allies who will defend you.
5. What is the extent of your suffering? Maybe only you are affected by the words and actions of others because you have thin skin. Ask around to make sure that others are similarly affected.

These questions can help you determine if you should take action. Before we get to the interventions, however, let us address the question about why a-holes exist. Sutton notes that when individuals pretend to be gatekeepers within their organisations, ‘sometimes they twist, exaggerate, or even defy the letter or spirit of the real rules, and will try to belittle, dismiss, frustrate, or ignore you, because they are insecure, lazy, on a power trip, or plagued by other personal quirks.’ Then there are those with real power as gatekeepers who

take sick satisfaction from frustrating and pushing others around. [For example, there are the] petty tyrants [who] wield power over some narrow but unavoidable domain and lord it over victims in small-minded, uncaring, and demeaning ways. The “Rule Nazi” is a common and especially vexing breed. […] “They cling to the rules like Leonardo DiCaprio clung to that door in Titanic—as if their lives depend on it. And they make sure everyone else does too, even when the rule doesn’t make sense or stands in the way of productivity.”

Robert Sutton

Sutton notes that petty tyrants exist because they have power over a narrow domain and have low prestige. Therefore, they ‘simmer and sulk’ about how they are being treated and it catalyses them into taking out their resentment on others with said power. An experiment at the University of Southern California supports this. Students were divided into two and labelled workers and idea producers. The workers were told that their role involves repetitive and demeaning tasks and that others would look down on them. The idea producers were told that they would be performing important tasks and that others would look up to them. After being primed with this information, they were then tasked with choosing activities for an imaginary partner to earn 50 dollars. The activities involved normal and demeaning tasks, like telling a funny joke or saying “I am filthy” five times respectively. As expected, the workers took out their new-found resentment by choosing the demeaning tasks for their imaginary partner to perform.

Disagreeable takers, in Adam Grant’s terminology, represented above, aren’t the only kinds of a-holes. Agreeable takers, people who smile to your face and then stab you in the back are also considered a-holes by Sutton. Recall, if you’re a consistent reader of this website, how Ray Dalio dealt with this problem in Bridgewater. He enforced radical honesty and radical transparency so that agreeable takers could be quickly identified and either reformed or removed. Sutton writes about another CEO who also encourages his employees to be blunt and honest with him and each other so that there’d be no occasion for people to smile at others on the surface and then stab them and the company in the back.    

The CEO emphasized that, so long as employees aren’t selfish or crazy, he doesn’t mind when such conversations get heated. He believes that problems are much easier to tackle when the facts and associated feelings are put on the table—so long as there is mutual respect and (when necessary) heartfelt apologies after people cool down.

Robert Sutton

In a nutshell, a-holes exist because of thin skins and troubled personalities, personal quirks like a selfish or Machiavellian disposition, and structural incentives. It is therefore advisable to not fight fire with fire since a-holes will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. Sutton concurs. He writes that fighting a-holes head on can be dangerous because you are inviting mean-spirited people to focus their attention on you and who will wait for just the right moment to make you pay.

Time wounds all heels

Groucho Marx

But some err too much on the side of caution and do nothing to help their situation. Here are ten such lies that people tell themselves about their a-hole situations.   

Ten Lies That People Tell Themselves

• It’s not that bad: Yes it is
• Things are getting better: If you’re living in a-hole central, they’re probably not
• Things will eventually get better: See above
• I’m learning so much!: It’s not worth the abuse
• Once I finish this important project, I’ll leave: Some other project will come and take its place, so you might as well leave ceremoniously when you can  
• I’m irreplaceable, so I can’t leave: If you’re so vital, why is there an a-hole problem in the first place? Are you contributing to it or are you actually powerless to change things?
• I pride myself on my thick skin: Read Proverbs 16:18 in the Hebrew Bible. Maybe you’re turning into an a-hole yourself?
• I can compartmentalize work and other aspects of my life: Your friends and family may not agree
• I have no right to complain, others are suffering too: Don’t be a martyr. Your actions affect others too. If you have a good reputation, staying in an a-holic company will give people who know you the wrong impression about said company. They may even encourage their loved ones to work there
• The grass is browner elsewhere: Review your options realistically before making assumptions about viable career moves. Make sure it isn’t an excuse to assuage your fear of change.  

If you are facing a proper a-hole problem at work and you’re determined that you’ve been sold by some of these lies, then it’s time to start figuring out what to do. Accordingly, the rest of this article will focus on that. It will be divided into (1) a-hole detection tips, (2) intervention strategies with a short excursus on the value of pro-social gossip to deal with a-holes, (3) how not to deal with A-holes, and (4) information concerning how to determine if we are part of the problem ourselves, i.e., if we are a-holes too.

How to Detect Them

Do some online research before working at a company. Check reputable ratings and rankings and comments from present and former employees working in the department you intend to work at. Speak in person with people who’ve worked there presently and previously. Ask them about the general culture and what insights they have about the people you will have to deal with. It would be helpful to know people who left because they were unhappy: the knowledge they proffer about the existence or lack thereof of a-holes may be invaluable. When corresponding with the people you’ll be working with, did you get a good first impression? Are there any hints that they might not be nice or good people? When meeting them in person for interviews, do you feel respected, or are there already signs of hostility or passive aggression? Familiarity breeds contempt, so things will likely get worse. How do the employees talk about their superiors? Do they say the right words without any hint of conviction? Do they change the topic quickly? Or do they launch into a disgruntled tirade? Triangulation may be important, but once you get enough similar responses of the kind above without mitigating expressions of enthusiasm anywhere, that is a red flag. When speaking with the superiors, note how they talk about and treat others below them. Is everyone else an incompetent loser? Do they have nothing positive to say about anyone who doesn’t grovel at their feet? Are employees living on the island in The Lord of the Flies? Note also instances of ‘aggressive teasing, rude interruptions, pained facial expressions, and glum silence.’ At meetings, how much do people in power speak compared to others? Do they let anyone else offer their two cents? What is the question to statement ratio? Too many declarative statements are a bad sign. Can you start with a small commitment? This way you can work on a project and then determine if there is an a-hole problem before committing for the long haul.   

How to Deal with Them

We’ve determined that one of the most effective, if a little infeasible ways of dealing with a-holes, is to simply leave the company you’re working at. This can be problematic however, if not done calmly and discreetly. Give advance notice and let it be a smooth hand-off, so you don’t leave your colleagues and clients hanging. Don’t burn bridges that you might need later and don’t give those jerks ammunition to gun down the allies you’ve left behind. Keep your leaving message short, sweet, and vague, and then get out. But, as mentioned, not everyone has the luxury of leaving their employment, so what else is one to do?

One thing you can do is to create more communication barriers from a-holes, like physical distance, so that you can find some relief from their verbal attacks. This applies to non-work settings, like when you move away from hostile commuters in the bus or train. In meetings, sit farthest away from the a-holes but on the same side of the table, so that there’d be no occasion for them to notice and start picking on you overtly or in more insidious ways. Figure out how to avoid them in all circumstances, for example, by leaving early for compulsory meetings and arriving late for social gatherings and so on. Sutton describes a product manager who would get up and say that he needs to call his elderly mother whenever he was stuck in a meeting with a-holes and needed an excuse to leave early. No one ever objected and he would indeed call his mom. Others would go to a nearby park, cafe, or somewhere quiet where they could get temporary relief.   

When you inevitably feel that strong sense of indignation, anger, or fear because of an authentic a-hole’s words and deeds, don’t be tempted to respond in a way that implies you’ve been affected by them.    

When they do something that generates a strong reaction from you—be it obsequious ass-kissing, effusive apologizing, trembling with fear, giving in to tears or anger, or sending that long and carefully worded email you spent an hour crafting in response to their imaginary emergency—the pleasure centers in their twisted minds light up.

Robert Sutton

Don’t give them any pleasure. Ignore them and their toxic words and actions as far as you’re able. Adopt the rhythm method and slow down (but don’t completely ignore) communications with them so that they are conditioned to wait. They may yet back off and focus their attention on more willing targets. Being invisible in this way is useful: you are no longer on their radar and so cannot ‘serve as a convenient scapegoat for their built-up bile.’ If you are living in a-hole central, this invisibility may, in fact, be your lifeline. Say as little as possible, do neither terrific or terrible work, be boring, and keep a blank expression.  

The next thing you can do is find bully blockers. These are bosses who have the aptitude and motivation to defend their subordinates from a-holes within and outside the company. Tag-team also with allies to rotate contact with a-holes so that everyone can bear some brunt of the a-holery and also share equal amounts of relief. Create an early warning system so that colleagues can inform others of incoming a-holes. Private messages on mobile phones seem ubiquitous enough to be used for this purpose and already has in more ways than I will ever know.

Try to reframe your situation in ways that downplay the ridicule, humiliating words, nasty and untrue rumours, the silent treatment, and so on, by telling yourself that “this is only a job,” or “these are small matters.” When done right, reframing is a powerful tool for offering emotional respite. A study at the University of Haifa which surveyed 225 Israeli employees supports this. Reframing is useful outside work time too. Deliberately thinking about more positive things and having fun outside of work helps people reduce their emotional strain while they’re at work.   

Here’s a list of reframing statements you can try:

• You aren’t alone . . .
• You aren’t to blame . . .
• Downplay the threat . . .
• Focus on the silver lining . . .
• Rise above it . . .
• Develop sympathy for the devil . . .
• Focus on the funny side . . .
• Look back from the future . . .

For more, read The A-hole Survival Guide

Emotional detachment is closely related to this intervention. Sutton explains the value of such detachment in stark terms.

My mother taught me “that anything worth doing is worth doing well.” Well, she was wrong. When you are surrounded [by] vile people, there are things that you still must do to keep your job or to keep the peace, but those jobs aren’t worth doing well. An engineer explained to me that his boss, and his boss’s boss, and senior management treated his team so badly that they only gave “MVE” (minimum viable effort)—a tactic inspired by best-selling author Eric Ries’s MVP concept (minimum viable product). He said, “We decided that those assholes don’t deserve any more from us.”

Robert Sutton

Give your best to those who deserve it. You aren’t obligated to do so for those who treat you like dirt.

The next thing you can try is forgiveness. Forgiving, but not forgetting a-holes even when they’ve not apologized or shown any remorse helps you let go of the hurt and reduces your anger and sadness. Even your heart rate and blood pressure will improve.

A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.

Francis Bacon

Now, if you’re resolved to do something more direct to improve your circumstances, there are several factors to consider.

(1) How much power do you have over the a-holes? Sutton recalls a conversation he had with a new Human Resource head for a Fortune 100 company who declared that she would fire all the abusive senior executives from the firm. Those executives went to the CEO who sided with them, and she was fired a few weeks later in their place.

(2) If you plan to take the problem of abusive behaviour to the higher ups, do you have documentation? You don’t want to get into a “he said, she said” situation. Save emails, social media exchanges, take pictures and video, and encourage others to do the same. Don’t record phone conversations though because that might be illegal depending on where you live.

(3) Do you have allies? You have a much better chance of winning if you have friends who can band together to handle and expel a-holes. Research by Martin Novak and others on evolutionary dynamics shows that co-operators – or in Adam Grant’s terminology, givers – flourish when groups of them band together amidst the larger sea of defectors.

(4) Are you dealing with a-holes who can be reformed, in other words, a-holes who aren’t usually a-holes but act that way because of external factors? In such cases, confronting them with moral anger, constructive intent, and good evidence that they are doing something bad, can work.   

(5) Are you dealing with Machiavellian a-holes? In these cases, and only if you cannot be invisible, being uncooperative and not letting yourself be seen as a doormat can help you. Some people take kindness for weakness and may turn even nastier when met with generosity of character. Machiavellian people consider others as mere tools to achieve their ends, but they will avoid others like themselves, so being a little nasty can help you here.

(6) Are you dealing with insecure a-holes? Examples of these include the petty tyrants described above.  Love bombing can help. I don’t mean the kind that narcissists do to win over their targets. Love bombing in his context merely means repaying nastiness with kindness. In other words, offer frequent compliments and return mean words with warmth and understanding. Be genuine about it, and they might just soften up for you.  

(7) Do you have leverage to set the culture of your immediate working environment? Enforcing the no-a-hole rule, laid out in Sutton’s first book on the subject, would help you and all decent people greatly.

Assholes are like cockroaches. If you shine a light on them, they run for cover. At our workplace, we’re starting to insist on more transparency, less backroom chatter, and an end to the secrecy that allows our resident asshole to carry on his antics. We share information with each other, refuse to let him trap us into private discussions of our co-workers, and generally don’t give him permission to manipulate us.

Cited in A-Hole Survival Guide

Companies that abide by some form of the no-a-hole rule include Baird, Concertia, Box, Eventbrite, Invoice2go, Royal Bank of Canada, J. Walter Thomson Worldwide, and Netflix.

(8) Can you round up all the alpha type a-holes and put them in a team? People with big personalities often step on too many toes. But if they’re all put in a team where they can be effective working with one another – people with similar temperaments do like each other – everyone else doesn’t have to deal with them.

(9) Are you comfortable with pro-social gossip? This might seem like a strange question to ask, since one of the most ubiquitous uses of human language is to talk about non-present others for a variety of reasons. In the present context, pro-social gossip can be used to warn innocent others of the checkered histories of people they are about to work with. There are good evolutionary reasons for gossip too, which we will get to later. But, because of the fact that gossip has a mixed reputation, it’s probably good to give it some extended treatment here.

Excursus on Gossip   

Dictionaries define gossip differently. This could be why people have such varied opinions about the value of gossip. One defines it as ‘idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others.’ Clearly, if this is what’s understood as gossip, it makes sense that it’s not held in high esteem among decent people. Rumours tend to become exaggerated with each new re-telling and the further away it gets from its source. In addition, the private affairs of others, if they don’t affect you personally or professionally, are really none of your business. So, you should not be speculating about those things. If you do, regularly and with mean-spirited intent, and have consequently caused harm to the people you gossip about, you are an a-hole.       

Another definition states that gossip is ‘casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details which are not confirmed as true.’ Again, if this is our definition of gossip, then clearly, it’s something that’s not desirable, since, even if you’re not talking about something personal and private, truth doesn’t enter the picture. These are not the definitions of gossip we’re looking for. In fact, these are the kinds of gossip that have been chastised throughout human history. All religions condemn gossip of this kind.     

Not only is the above kind of gossip unethical, it is also unproductive. Research shows that workplace gossip leads to lost productivity and wasted time, the dissolution of trust and morale, increased anxiety among employees, divisiveness, the promotion of long-standing hurts, jeopardized chances for upward mobility, and the attrition of good employees. People who are perceived as gossip-mongers are not well-liked or trusted either, even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface, and however much power they might wield in the short term. If this is the kind of gossip you’re facing at work, then you might be living in a-hole central. To deal with this situation, understand the causes of the gossip at your workplace and don’t contribute to it. Keep walking, change the subject, don’t believe it without substantiating evidence, and engage instead in positive gossip, i.e., passing along nice things said about others. Hopefully, it will go away on its own. If pernicious gossip persists, check if there are formal policies in the company handbook that address this.     

Nasty as gossip can become, speaking about non-present others hasn’t evolved and survived for millennia since the dawn of spoken language if it didn’t serve an adaptive purpose. Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have discovered that gossip, as defined more neutrally in this paragraph, evolved to help human communities, usually not numbering above 150 (i.e., Dunbar’s number), monitor each other’s reputations and maintain indirect reciprocity, i.e., to promote cooperative behaviour through the anticipation of future interaction. As these communities grew larger, it would have been impossible for people to connect with everyone in their in-group, and so speech that conveyed information about non-present others helped secure cooperation and other kinds of altruistic behaviours that would otherwise not manifest.  

• 65% of conversations consist of social topics
• People on average gossip about 50 minutes a day    
• Gossip is a cross-cultural phenomenon
• Younger people engage in more negative gossip than older adults
• About three quarters of gossip is neutral,
• But negative gossip is twice as common as positive gossip

So, gossip is ubiquitous and does have an adaptive function. It promotes social bonding among groups of co-operators, informs others of socially acceptable behaviour, and galvanises people to shun cheaters and free riders. The problem, however, as we’ve seen above, is that gossip can and has been used for selfish and cruel purposes, i.e., to spread misinformation about innocent others usually because of envy, naked or misplaced ambition, and the like.

Speaking badly of people is a form of projection. What you don’t like about yourself, you tend to point out in others.

Lori Palatnik

What is the lesson that can be learned here? Engage only in honest gossip and apply an 80:20 ratio when it comes to balancing positive to negative gossip. In the present context, this means only using it for good, i.e., to warn others of manipulative or Machiavellian type a-holes that they will encounter in their line of work.  

By giving help to troubled targets and witnesses as they try to size up and deal with jerks, you not only do good deeds; you equip yourself to withstand and to battle the malice and incivility in your own life. Your allies will usually feel obliged to return the favor, to help support, protect, and fight for you. And you will learn second-hand lessons that can help you to deal with your own asshole problems down the line.

Robert Sutton

The Wrong Way to Fight Them

Now that you’ve seen what you can do to deal with a-holes at work, here are some things you should not do. Do not do the first thing that comes to mind, where anger or fear might impair your common sense, like fighting fire with fire by using direct confrontation. Not only does this not work, but it will also provoke a chain of hostility that may never end. Remember, a-holes tend to be thin-skinned and vindictive. Second, do not ask crooked people and systems for help. If you are living in a-hole central, there will likely be strong incentives for HR and senior management to protect a-holes.

Determining if You Are One

Returning to a point made in the introduction, there is a large discrepancy between the percentages of people who say that they’ve seen a-holic behaviour and those who admit that they’ve acted in such ways. Given the human penchant for downplaying their weaknesses along with their general lack of self-awareness, here are some factors that contribute to our being perceived to be an a-hole:

• You are around a lot of them
• You have (or think you have) power over others, when you once had little

• You are a competitive person who often feels threatened by the successes of others
• You are rich

In one study […] researchers found that drivers in the least expensive cars (e.g., an old Dodge Colt) cut in front of other drivers at the intersection less than 10% of the time and always stopped for pedestrians. In contrast, those drivers in the most expensive cars (e.g., a new Mercedes-Benz) cut in front of other drivers about 30% of the time and failed to stop for pedestrians nearly 50% of the time.

Robert Sutton

• People tell you that you are a cold person
• You martyr yourself to work and expect others to do the same
• You are a “rule Nazi”
• You don’t sleep enough
• You are stressed
• You tend to be cynical and negative about most things

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than the honesty.

Richard Needham

If you constantly complain that you meet a-holes everywhere, look in the mirror and you might find the reason. Treating others poorly tends to come around. Thankfully, improving self-awareness on this issue is simple: get feedback from trusted sources, i.e., people who have no incentive to flatter you. When they lay it on you, stifle the impulse to argue back. Say thank you and reflect on what they’ve said and how you can change.

Only Connect

Most people strive for connection. But mixed signals, the stresses of life, the pressures of work, and myriad other factors get in the way of the civility and altruistic kindness that we – on our best days – wish to give and receive from others. Like porcupines snuggling with one another to keep warm on a winter’s night, we struggle to find the right distance between the pain of proximity and the biting cold of aloneness. While the perfect distance for most will involve decency, good manners, and cooperative behaviour, it is a hard position to maintain. But ‘no one ever says, when they are on their deathbed: I wish I had been meaner.’ There may, therefore, be enough compunction in the majority of us to, in the words of the novelist E. M. Forster, only connect.  

Here’s a reward for making it this far: A video of Superman with a GoPro! Have a nice day.