Social First Aid Kits

Sometimes other people suck just because they're human

I just got back from an incredible trip to Dubai, which might have to be its own post later this week.

But the relevant story for today is that I also spent the 14 hour flight home living everyone’s worst nightmare, squashed into an Economy seat next to a very exhausted toddler and her even more exhausted mother. They had started their travels in India, so at 2am when the flight took off from Dubai they were already rumpled and tired and the toddler had clearly reached that point of exhaustion that turns into frenetic shrieking delirium. She refused to sleep, screeched and cried, screamed for the TV to be turned back on and generally refused her mother’s desperate attempts to get her to go to sleep so everyone around her could rest. Because the toddler was in the middle seat, she spent a large part of the flight periodically kicking me while she did her minimal sleeping and occasionally hitting me to try to get me to turn the TV on while her mother dozed or perhaps just sat with her eyes closed hoping the window would open, pulling us all out into depressurized peace. Adding to the general chaos, they were seated inside while I had the aisle, so every diaper change required that I get up and let them out, which happened with some frequency.

I garnered my fair share of sympathetic looks from other passengers and the older guy sitting in front of me assured me that I had earned some kind of place in heaven for putting up with it.

What I found interesting as a usually irritable person was the realization that the situation didn’t actually bother me at all. Given that it very much should have bothered me, I tried to figure out why.

Preparing for Other People

The first and most important piece was that I had come prepared for other humans. I had the equivalent of a social first aid kit and used it with abandon. I had brought not only headphones but also ear plugs and an eye mask. As a result, I was able to drown out most of the toddler chaos and got a reasonably solid 5 hour stretch of sleep from 3am to 8am where I only got kicked a couple times.

The second piece, I think, is that I’ve traveled with my own children enough to be able to deeply sympathize with the hollow-eyed desperation of a mother trying to get her asshole toddler to go to sleep when it’s clear that sleep is the absolute last thing the kid is going to do. I could have piled on to this woman’s seemingly endless and existential suffering by giving her side-eye or sighing loudly when I had to wake up or move everything off my tray table for the 15th time so they could go to the bathroom or change clothes, but I’m not sure how adding to her suffering would have lessened my own.

There was also something freeing about having experienced this woman’s suffering firsthand many times - often three times over and adding in my own and my children’s motion-sickness to boot. This time I could watch and sympathize and also not have to do anything about it. There was no obligation to intervene in the same way there’s no obligation to intervene when walking by and watching people stuck in traffic. Not only is there no point in intervening in a toddler meltdown unless you have some sort of advanced degree in toddler behavior, but your intervention may very well make things worse.

This toddler cyclone of suffering wasn’t mine and I didn’t have to try to soothe her or make her feel better or wrestle her down to sleep. The most I contributed was a sad affirmation that “the TV went to sleep!” when the tiny human appealed to me to turn on the TV her mother had turned off in a desperate attempt to get her to close her eyes.

The third big picture contribution to my resilience in the face of toddler exhaustion was probably that I had just finished an incredible week in an incredible place where the sun shone all day and I ate curry and hummus and chocolate covered dates with abandon. I had swum in the Persian Gulf and walked miles each day in the sun and gotten thoroughly robbed by friendly spice salesmen in the souks and I was feeling full of bonhomie and general well-being. This aura of benevolent relaxation extended even to the vicissitudes of long-haul international flights in economy with toddlers.

A fourth and (very) important component of my situation and my reaction to it relates to responsibility and blame. The fact is, toddlers can’t help causing extreme suffering. While this reality didn’t change anything about the number of times people were woken by her screams or the number of times I got kicked, it fundamentally affected the way I felt about it. Had she been a grown adult behaving similarly after too many drinks, my irritation would have undoubtedly been much greater. It would have added anger and moral blame to the physical and mental discomfort I was already feeling.

Causing Suffering is Not (Always) a Moral Failing

The unavoidable reality of toddler-induced suffering points to an important and often overlooked part of human life. Sometimes people are disruptive of our plans or don’t do what we want them to do not because they’re terrible people but because they’re human. People sometimes (or maybe even often) cause suffering just because they’re humans living around other humans. Humans get tired and cranky and stressed and depressed and their neurotransmitters fail to transmit things they should. That reality applies just as much to adults as to toddlers. I’ve had my fair share of situations where I didn’t show up for other people like I wanted to just because my brain or body wouldn’t cooperate. It doesn’t make me a bad person - just a person.

Other times people cause suffering simply because there are a lot of them trying to do things at the same time. Rush hour traffic isn’t any one person’s fault (at best, it’s a structural failing of not enough public transit or something) and the more we can work to avoid it or at least accept it as a cost of living with other people, the better off we’ll be.

Sometimes people cause suffering precisely because we love them and sympathize them. Watching someone we love go through a serious illness can create its own guilt in the sufferer precisely because their suffering is causing other people to suffer as well. And what a burden that compounded suffering is.

Whatever the cause, it’s good to remember that we negatively affect other people all the time through no moral fault of our own. And the more we can insulate ourselves or make ourselves physically and mentally resilient against the suffering inherent in social living, the more we can walk through our social world with equanimity. We can also do a better job of identifying when we can make things better and when we need to simply share a smile of commiseration and keep walking.

Preparing a Social First Aid Kit

I talk a lot here about various kinds of behavioral things we can do to prepare for engaging with other people, including giving people the benefit of the doubt or avoiding the fundamental attribution error, but sometimes preparing for other people means taking care of our own needs so we’re starting out at a reasonably tolerant baseline. And then recognizing that sometimes people cause other people suffering just because they’re human beings.

There are some basic common sense things we can keep in our social first aid kit. Because we’re human, we won’t have all of these things 100% of the time, but the closer we can the better off we’ll be living with and interacting with other humans. Am I great at all of these? No. But I’m getting a lot better, because living around other people is important to me and I’ve also found it’s hard on me at the same time.

So here are some quick suggestions for building a social first aid kit (obviously this list is not exhaustive, and I would love to hear what you have in your kit in the comments!):

1. Physical Comfort:

   1. Short term tools you can carry with you can make a big difference in how tolerant you’ll be of other people: things like ear plugs, snacks, a water bottle, a scarf or layers can turn a difficult social situation into a manageable inconvenience, as my 14 hour flight demonstrated.

   2. Long term preparations include moving your body so you’re less stressed and able to handle mildly uncomfortable situations like a crowded bus and getting enough sleep so you’re not exhausted while trying to be social. As a minor example, I started eating a snack on my commute home so I arrive home to three kids and don’t compound the social chaos with hypoglycemia and avoidable irritability. I also try to avoid alcohol the night before I’ll be solo parenting, because a tired mother is an irritable mother. But that wisdom applies to a variety of other social situations as well.

2. Emotional and Mental Comfort:

   a. If you’re carrying around trauma or emotional baggage or the desire to lash out at other people just because, it’s a good idea to work through that in whatever way seems to make sense. If everyone consistently brings their own mental and emotional junk to human social life, things get messy quickly. The more we can leave our own junk at home, the better we’ll all get along.

   b. If you’re an introvert, manage your socialization so you’re not put in situations where you’re overwhelmed by other humans just trying to human. I’ve had to learn this (over and over again) over the years and different strategies work at different times.
   

3. Embrace the Social Suck: Finally, sometimes you just need to give in, accept that you’ll be uncomfortable and embrace the suck. If we’re stuck in traffic or next to a sleep-deprived toddler or caring for a sick loved one, it can be helpful (but hard) to remember that it’s no one’s fault, complaining or making other people miserable about it just makes things worse, that this suffering is likely balanced out by a bunch of other great things we get from social life and that this particular form of social suck too shall pass.

Human social life takes a lot out of us. It’s glorious and beautiful and meaningful and exhausting and irritating and sometimes straight up infuriating. The messiness of humans living together means that we need to prepare for that messiness. Doing what we can to make ourselves more physically and emotionally resilient to the suffering that humans inadvertently cause each other can help reduce the overall load of suffering in the world, which seems like a worthwhile thing to do.

What’s in your Social First Aid Kit? Let me know in the comments! And as always, if you like what you read here, please share and subscribe.