Reduction

People make me sad.

People make me really, really sad.

There are lots of reasons for this, but one thing making me sad right now (yes, just one, I'm not going to go into too many details right now) is reduction. And you might be wondering why that makes me sad. After all, this is coming from the same person who describes hairbrushes as wavefunctions and humans as balls of cells.

Yeah, guilty as charged. I'm a hypocrite.

For some reason, it leaves an awfully sick taste in my mouth that you can sum up a person's character in the following details:

• which arbitrary set of borders they grew up within
• which arbitrary set of borders they were born within
• their gender(s)
• their sexuality

People are not inherently bland. They are not interesting solely by virtue of being born in a place you consider "exotic" or something like that. To treat someone as being interesting only because of their nationality or their race or their gender, to reduce them to just that in your eyes, is demeaning and humiliating.

People are interesting for their quirks, their reactions, their passions, their mysteries, their unknowns, the way they crack up at little things and develop complex in-jokes, the things that excite them and make them happy and make them laugh, for the things you have to find out in more than just a potted summary. People are most interesting when you can't describe them.