SPIRITUAL SOAP: Weird & Güd - An Invitation to Cancel Yourself

Ostracism is best served micro-dosed, not over-dosed.

Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!

I enjoy research too much and I’m a shameless critic. Weird & Güd is the conjoining of those misanthropic qualities into something useful: recommendations and fascinations neatly packaged together for you every week, some hermit-ism required after all.

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The Weird

Your ex isn’t the only person who’s used silent treatment as a punishment — pretty much everyone ever has been on one side of ostracism at some point. Humans have used rejection as a repercussion for anything they don’t like since the dawn of us.

Whether you’re getting canceled by your college or exiled from your tribe, rejection is an ancient ritual.

Ostracism was in its heyday during ancient Greece; the term ostracism stems from the term ostracon, a shard of pottery used for writing. The Greeks loved their pottery; they loved it so much that shards of pottery were to them the way pieces of paper are to you. People would use these shards to carve anything they needed to write, but one of the most popular uses for these ostraca was a Hunger Games twist on our love of rejecting each other.

Ostracon inscribed with names dated to over 2,500 years old.

For a little while under Athenian democracy, ostracism was just another fun public event like parades or any other distraction to keep the masses from purging their politicians and each other. This event was a little different from a parade though, unless the parade ended with a citizen being elected for expulsion from society for 10 years. The practice of ostracism was an unpopularity contest; citizens would scratch a name into those pottery shards once a year and if any name reached 6,000 votes, they’d be banished from the city for up to 10 years.

What made the practice of ostracism unique for Athens was its ultimate purpose; sure, people sometimes voted for their annoying neighbor, but it was mostly a tool to curb power. Some pretty major figures were sent packing, like war heroes, politicians, and even Megacles — Hippocrates’ son (yes, that Hippocrates. And you thought you disappointed your father with that 40k art school debt you’re using to manage a meme Instagram).

Ostracism has its benefits. Whether it was a freeloading tribe member or a tyrannical politician on the rise, sometimes sending people into exile is about survival. The human brain is sharply attuned to impending ostracism. Your therapist might want to curb your fear of rejection, but your biology prefers prevention; our sensitivity to rejection gave us the chance to course-correct before being exiled to certain death.

As with much of our biology, we’re running outdated software. Living out Marshall McLuhan's prediction about the “global village” we call the internet today, our rejection protection program is on constant red alert. Not irreparably offending our ancient groups of around 50 members is a realistic task.

Not offending the roughly 3 billion people with access to the internet is not only less realistic, it’s a suicide mission.

That’s not hyperbole; ostracism is a powerful tool, one that affects us just as it was designed to for times when group cohesion meant survival. Pure social rejection isn’t as stylish as the Athenian practice of ostracism, but we still use it today.

Unlike the Athenians who exclusively exiled the powerful, it’s now the ostracizers whose power is outsized.

Bad joke gone viral? Banished. Inevitably trip over your own ignorance? Enterally ignored. Fossils from your unenlightened past found out? Fired, unfriended, and everything in between.

With 145 million users on Twitter alone every day, it’s only a matter of luck and time as to whether you become the next overnight celebrity voted off the island.

Our ancient tool of ostracism has been supercharged in our hyper-connected world. Rather than preserve our survival, it's become a force to preserve conformity. While there are standards of conformity worth ostracizing people over — you know, like not assaulting people or blaring music through your phone in a crowd (it’s never good music either) — too much conformity is its own danger.

Ostracism is a weapon. Just like any good weapon, it’s meant to hurt; social rejection triggers the same part of our brain as physical pain. It also increases a target’s aggression, lowers their self-esteem, and in extreme cases, leaves them with lasting trauma. It’s such a noxious tool that it was specifically named in the Universal Declaration for Human Rights: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile."

Few will argue that ostracizing dangerous people is unethical. The problem comes when we justify ostracizing regular people because we perceive any non-conformity as a threat.

Yet, for those willing to carelessly wield the only weapon that’s consistently terrified humans since the beginning of time, perhaps the real threat was never other people at all.

The Güd

Well, well, well. Here you are, stuffing more ideas into your brain.

How many ideas have you had today? I’m cutting you off.

In fact, I invite you to stop reading this. All the words that come next will just explain what you can experience for yourself if you put down your phone and just sit there — no music, no reading, no-thing. Just you and that endangered beast we call thoughts. Bored yet? Good.

One of the nostalgic parts of our youth we’ll recount to our kids is boredom:

“When I was little, sometimes there’d be nothing for me to do — no smartphone or in-brain game console to play with. It’d sit and look around me, notice the ants weaving through the grass or the stitching unraveling from the rug. I’d come up with make-believe characters, give them funny names, and think of the adventures they’d go on.”

“Mommy, what is make-believe?”

Just like all necessities of the past that are no longer necessities, from cooking to farming, boredom is taken up now only as an art.

You’re rarely forced to feel boredom today. It’s supply and demand; we have more access to information than we have the time to consume it. One of the few times you’re still forced into fasting your brain from a constant stream of information is in the shower, a place esteemed by all for its magic ability to make you think.

There’s nothing special about a shower, it’s simply one of the only places left in which we’re alone and disconnected. Prison would have the same effect if it wasn’t for all those other parts of prison.

Whether in business, in art, or in science, boredom is discovered again and again as the crucial ingredient for the coveted breakthrough. I could cite an endless stream of studies that prove the harm done by a boredom deficit to creativity, happiness, and probably any other positive element you can name, but you already know that.

Our trouble with boredom isn’t that we don’t know its value, it’s simply not as seductive as the constant stream of distraction and dopamine only a moment away from us.

Avoiding boredom is often the best way to avoid ourselves.

Yet, as with anything of value, there must be a risk for there to be a reward. In that empty space, we can also have original thoughts. These are thoughts not given to us directly by any media or person, but organically borne of the connections we make in our own mind. Most of us are starved for organic, locally-sourced, free-range thoughts after a steady diet of mass-produced and heavily processed thinking.

Boredom is one of the few remaining states in which we fully use our minds independent of any outside influence. There’s only one way to become an individual and not a mash-up of media and culture — use your own mind and see what you find.

It seems you’ve continued stuffing a few last bites of information into you. I won’t judge you because your taste is unarguably excellent, but we’ve come to the end of this information feast and now you have a choice. On to the next course or digest and test the art of boredom?

It’s not “doing nothing” if you’re thinking.

I hope this makes your week a little weirder and a little güder. Now go forth, be weird, and above all, be güd.

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I sit alone at a desk biting my nails to bring you every edition of Spiritual Soap. Is it worth it? Don’t tell me, show me.