Boundaries: a Meditation on Rules Inspired by Discord (Patreon)

Today's content will be helpful if you ever want to deal with me! Or if you want to think about social-fu. Otherwise, feel free to skip it! But hey, I haven't done a philosophy-type ramble the way I used to on Livejournal in a while, so here's a thing.

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I grew up exquisitely aware of boundaries.

I didn’t always understand what I was perceiving when I was younger, but I knew them all the same: I knew that something made my household different from other households. Something made my upbringing different from other upbringings. Things that were permissible to other people weren’t to me. None of this felt unfair—it was just life, and as a child I was more interested in figuring out the rules quickly so I could stay out of trouble than I was in complaining that the rules existed.

I can look back on this now and call it an advantage of my particular early childhood: I learned quickly that rules were contextual, and that you had to adapt to the situation’s rules and play by them if you wanted to win. And I knew what the rewards of winning were:

• You don’t get into trouble.
• You are accepted by the group.
• You are able to lean on the group for help.

These were powerful lessons, because they carry through into every aspect of human society, and have for as long as humans have gathered in groups. Every situation has its own rules. Sometimes those rules are explicit: “Shirt and shoes required” signs on stores. Sometimes those rules are implicit: “Don’t show up at a wedding drunk.” If you pay attention, you’ll see that many of the rules are part of a tree that imparts its properties to everything under it: “Don’t start fist fights in public spaces” is a society-wide rule, so if you are in a coffee shop (a public space), then you know ‘don’t start a fist fight.’

The consequences for breaking the rules are also pretty easy to figure out. You lose the privileges of being a good actor in that space. That covers everything from ‘people don’t like me’ to ‘I’ve been exiled from the group.’

I have been watching, with amazement, how the internet has spent years eroding our perception of boundaries. I am fairly certain that most of the people around me weren’t raised in a barn: when I ask kids, even, “do you talk with your friends the way you’d talk with your parents, or your teachers” they know the right answer immediately. They understand that communication is contextual, and behavior limited by the space and situation you’re in; that you don’t act in a classroom the way you do at recess. 

The smart ones learn fast that there are some things you don’t say, even if you think them. The dumb ones learn, painfully, that if you run your mouth in the wrong situation, you will pay for it. They are taught in school that the stupid stuff you do or say for your youtube audience might be used against you when you’re applying for a job in fifteen years. The smartest ones stay off social media completely. “Why would I want to tell the whole world what I’m thinking.” I have hopes for their generation. Slim ones, but some hope. 

But those of us who grew up when the internet was new(ish)… who basically had the whole thing shoved in our laps? Not so much. Not only do a lot of these adults not know how to control themselves on social media—what is essentially a public forum, despite their treatment of it as a private space—but they have made their private thoughts public so often that they no longer have filters. Not only that, many of them think it’s a virtue to have no filters. They think it’s appropriate to treat every situation as if it is free of context, and believe that they should have the right to do or say what they want, regardless of what’s going on around them.

It is a weird form of entitlement to believe that your opinion not only always matters, but is more important than anything or anyone else. It is even more bizarre to think that acting on this belief won’t incur consequences. And it is three times crazier to blame the people around you for not being more capable of handling your discourtesy when you’re the one breaking the rules. “You should be able to deal with behaviors that don’t belong in this time or space better” is bullying. It’s an attempt to shame people into accepting misbehavior.

Let’s be frank about this: the real issue is the person misbehaving. Anything else is shifting the blame. And we don’t shift blame unless either we believe, secretly, that we’re in the wrong… or we believe that we can never do wrong. Neither of these is acceptable.

You don’t act in a classroom the way you do at home with your family. You don’t act at a coffee shop the way you would in your bedroom. You don’t say things to strangers that you would to trusted intimates. You don’t expect people to allow you to act like they’re your intimate when you haven’t earned that level of trust or license. You don’t get to decide for other people that you should be allowed to act like a friend when they don’t know you from Adam or Eve.

And above all, you don’t act like it’s other people’s problem when you don’t bother to follow the rules.

There is a great deal of joy in a gathering of human beings who have accepted the rules, spoken and unspoken, who can then get on with the business of interacting without friction because they’re standing on firm and common ground. If you want the joys and advantages of being accepted by a group, then you have to play by its rules. And I guarantee that stating that those rules shouldn’t apply because they don’t elsewhere isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Please don’t think this is about me. This is true of every human group. All of them create networks of rules, tacit and explicit, and hold their members accountable to those rules. Transgression is always punished; flexibility in response to those rules is inevitably based on another rule (as in groups where “be kind and give people second chances” might be used to modify “but they’re being rude.”) No one can escape this: it’s foundational to “how do we make groups cohere.”

I think of these principles as obvious—as I said, I grew up observing boundaries, and making it my business to learn as quickly as possible what the spoken and unspoken rules were—but maybe it’s not something people pay attention to anymore. Certainly the skills you use to uncover the implicit rules are downplayed; the best tool you have is to listen and observe, without participating, until you understand what’s going on. But maybe it’s also our fault for not making these principles more explicit. Certainly people tell me all the time that I am too subtle, and that sometimes I should be blunt about things that need saying. So I’m doing my part today.

• Rules are contextual. 
• What’s appropriate in one space may not be appropriate in another. 
• If you want the benefits of belonging to a group, you have to do the work of fitting in; it’s not the group’s job to make allowances for you. 
• Arguing that the group should act in some different way will win you disfavor. Continually acting in this way will see you exiled.
• Boundaries exist for a reason. If you don’t like the fences, adapt or leave.

Hopefully this will help future people. Particularly around me.