There's a place for everyone

OR: fantastic niches and where to find them

Photo cred: my dad

Someone once asked me, “What’s something you believe in, despite not having any evidence for it?”

Without thinking, I said “There’s a place for everyone.” As in: every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

This is, I think, the unspoken fault line that divides all ideologies. If you trace arguments about marginal tax rates or soybean tariffs or whatever back to their origin, you will usually find a disagreement about whether our ideal world contains all of the inhabitants of our current world, or whether reaching Utopia will require us to toss some folks overboard. We don’t talk much about this, because if the people on Team Overboard were honest about who they plan to purge, none of their intended victims would be friends with them, let alone vote for them.

I’m on Team Nobody Goes Overboard because I believe every human has equal moral value—that’s the axiomatic, “no evidence for it” part. But I don’t just believe that there should be a place for everyone. I also believe that there is a place for everyone, and there’s plenty of evidence for that belief, and there are some unfortunate reasons why not everyone believes it, all of which I present to you now.

A SPECIES OF WEIRDOS

Evolutionary biologists say that humans occupy the “cognitive niche”—we stay alive by using our thinky bits. But the cognitive niche isn’t just one pocket in evolutionary space. It’s an infinite honeycomb of niches, because our brains allows us to customize ourselves in ways that other animals can’t. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian leopard or an alt-right penguin, but humans come in all varieties: some of them like partying on boats, others like painting Warhammer figurines, some think it’s immoral to eat garlic, and others want to live as dogs.

In fact, it’s difficult to find anything that literally everybody likes or dislikes. Pizza? At least 2% of people don’t care for it. Chocolate? 4% would rather not. Sex? ~1% say “none for me thanks.”¹² And then, of course, there are the folks who get their jollies from things that the rest of us find foul, like getting tied up and hit with a stick, or eating poop sandwiches.

(I experienced the wondrous variance of humanity firsthand when I had a bit part in one of the worst movies of all time. The user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are almost universally negative, but apparently there are people out there who love to see a blind Diane Keaton crash into a table of champagne flutes³.)

We don’t have a good way of talking about all this diversity because we don’t have good ways of categorizing people⁴. But here’s one way of looking at it. According to an analysis by my friends Slime Mold Time Mold, if human minds differ from each other in even 100 ways—which is not that many!—and those differences are normally distributed, then 99% of people are extreme in at least one way. Which is to say: statistically, everyone is special.

That’s just looking at traits, which we might assume are more nature than nurture. People’s experiences specialize them even further—two equally conscientious people can end up obsessed with locomotives or Zen gardening, depending on where they grow up, what classes they happen to take, who they date, and whether, at a critical moment in their development, they watched the scene in Spiderman 2 (2004) where Tobey Maguire stops a runaway train.

STOP PUSHING PAPER, START PUSHING PEOPLE

Our abundance of weirdos creates diversity not only in supply, but also in demand. All those odd people want odd things, creating odd jobs for other odd people to fill. Here are just a few of them:

• Professional bridesmaid

• Person who crams people into crowded subway cars

• Underwater pizza delivery guy

• Dog chef

• Trash detective

• Teeth designer

• Fire watcher

• Bovine reproductive technician

You can read that list thinking to yourself, “Which of these jobs might I like to do?” But the better question is: “Which jobs are still missing?” There is no Central Occupation Authority that decides which jobs should be created. You can get a pizza delivered underwater because someone saw an opportunity and took it, and the infinite and ever-changing weirdness of humanity means there are opportunities yet to be taken.

And that’s just thinking of niches in the dumbest sense possible, which is “things you can do in exchange for money.” People’s needs are so dire and so diverse that there are niches upon niches crying out for someone to fill them.

In high school, my sister was the Breakup Whisperer. Even her most distant acquaintances would seek her counsel on ending their relationships, or her comfort when those relationships had been ended for them. (“Breakup Whisperer” sounds better than “Dump Consultant”.) Although her paycheck at the time said “Subway Sandwich Artist,” the real place she fit was on our front porch, trying to talk a 16-year-old boy through his first emotions.

We need a whole lot more than just Breakup Whisperers. We need D&D Group Conveners, Last-Minute Babysitters, People Who Write Articles Online Explaining The Confusing Endings of Certain Movies, A Cappella Concert Attendees, Wikipedia Editors, Phone Fixers, Local Historians, Post-Tragedy Casserole Providers, Yelp Reviewers, Field Trip Chaperones, and on and on, forever. Roll a few of those together, and baby, that’s a niche.

FLAMING CHICKENS

If there’s an abundance of niches, why does it seem like so many people fail to find theirs?

Three reasons. The first: most niches are local, and that isn’t where people look.

When I grew up, everybody was talking about “globalization,” which always seemed to be about how we can get Tamagotchis from Shanghai to Scranton in 24 hours or whatever. Maybe I missed this because I was, like, eight, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning the globalization of attention. We can move electrons even faster than we can move Tamagotchis, and the result is that everyone from Shanghai to Scranton is largely looking at, listening to, and talking about the same things. You can see this in the demise of local news, the consolidation of the internet, and all other forms of oligopoly.

The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected. If everyone’s trying to be an Instagram relationship advice influencer, nobody’s trying to be their friendly neighborhood Breakup Whisperer. Plus, everybody, no matter how much of a nobody they are, has at least a few people who are counting on them, whose lives they can ruin or enrich, and it’s hard to do much enriching when you’re fretting full-time about who’s gonna be the next president.

Local niches are important because they can pack a lot of meaning into a tiny space; they make it so that more people can matter. When I was thirteen, I got promoted to moderator of the “Flaming Chickens” forum of a Yu-Gi-Oh! message board, which is where people were allowed to “flame” things that they hated (stepdads, math class, low-quality English dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes). I was so excited because it meant I meant something. Was the job pointless? Yes. Was it not a “job” at all in the sense that it paid nothing? Yes. Did the forum eventually die because of an infidelity scandal inside the polycule of people who ran the message board? Also yes. But for a bit, I fit.

THE TRAGEDY OF NICKY

The second reason why people end up without a niche: we act like finding one is personal, private, and painless. It’s not.

If you’re trying to figure out which car to buy, which person to date, or which taco place to try, there’s are whole industries waiting to assist you. But if you want to figure out where you fit in, you’re on your own. The education system won’t let you leave until you can add, subtract, read, and write, but they’ll give you a diploma even if you have no clue who you are or what you want.

We assume that everyone falls into the right slot just by knocking around the world like a human-sized Plinko chip. But niches can be tiny, peculiar, and hidden away, and there’s no guarantee you’ll find yours without a heave or a shove.

I once ran into an old classmate—let’s call her Nicky—who was trying to choose between competing offers from consulting firms. Nicky was having a hard time, and it soon became clear why: she didn’t want to be a consultant at all. “What do you like to do?” I asked. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t know.” For her, consulting was the default option, an industry willing to take someone with brains and grit but no particular interests, and at the end of college she was surprised to find that was her.

That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.

When people fail to find their niche, and when we fail to help them find it, we don’t just suffer from their absence. We also suffer from their presence in the wrong place. People often end up doing awful things because they never figured out what else to do. Nobody is born with a hankering to build prisons or raid pensions or market vapes to kids—their Plinko chips got jammed in an evil slot because they never landed in a good one.

That’s why “where do I fit in?” is not a private question, like the password to your bank account or the color of your underwear. We all have a stake in you finding your place, because we’re all better off when you like your life. Well-slotted people make good neighbors, bosses, partners, and parents. Unmoored, detached, disaffected people end up trying to figure out whether 10-year-olds prefer vapes that taste like cotton candy or blue raspberry.

PLENTY OF OPENINGS ON THE MILLET FARM

The third reason is the opposite of the second: some people think that finding your place is impossible.

Here’s the canonical case: you grow up with people who know from age five that they want to be doctors, truck drivers, belly dancers, whatever. But you have no idea where you fit in, and as time goes on, you start to suspect that you don’t fit in anywhere.

There’s a couple things going on here. First, you should check back in with those folks and see how many of them ended up liking the life that was chosen for them by a five-year-old. A few of them probably got lucky and the best role for them in life was one of the eight jobs that a child can name. Fortunately, there’s another 8 billion jobs that you only learn about later. Some of us have to spend a little longer acquainting ourselves with the world before we figure out where we belong in it.

(Strangely enough, the characters in my Playmobil playset did not include “blogger.”)

Second, anyone who thinks they fit in nowhere probably has an unrealistic view of how fitting in feels. I know some people say they love their jobs, like love love their jobs, like they’re in a constant state of euphoria, as if doctoring or belly dancing is just as good as a continuous IV drip of barbiturates. I don’t know how many of these people are telling the truth, but let’s assume it’s some of them.

I think this says a lot more about them than it says about their niche. Remember: people are weird in lots of ways! Some of them are born with barbiturate-blood; they get to be happy all the time. The rest of us may experience occasional negative emotions, and this is not cause for alarm. I have it on good authority that even the Breakup Whisper occasionally tires of Breakup Whispering.

I sometimes have to remind myself that, until the 1800s, most people worked in agriculture. We don’t know how many of those people liked working in agriculture—feudal lords never thought to survey the serfs about their workplace satisfaction. A lot of them probably hated it. But if humans could survive for millennia when every career test had only one possible outcome (“Congratulations! Your responses indicate that you are best suited for the job of RAISING MILLET FOR THE LOCAL BARON”), then we must have some ability to adapt our expectations to our opportunities.

So it’s not that the world magically offers the lock to fit everyone’s key. It’s that everyone’s key has a bit of give, enough to fit the locks available. We screw this up when we assume that our keys are made out of Play-Doh and they can fit anywhere, or when we assume they’re made out of obsidian and they’ll shatter if you try to stick ‘em in the wrong place.

Many of us discover this in love. The standard marriage plot comes in two acts:

1. Find the right person

2. Live happily ever after

But what do you do when your soulmate wants to keep the house at 85 degrees while you want it at 62, or when he refuses to eat your mom’s famous beef tongue enchiladas, or when she wants to name your firstborn after her favorite great-uncle (Bo, short for Bocephus) but you want to name him after your favorite Transformer (Cliff, short for Cliffjumper⁵)? You adapt, your compromise, you squirm around until you find the way of holding each other that doesn’t make either of your arms go numb.

(I once shared this insight with my wife, thinking it was a revelation, and she patiently explained that she had understood this from a young age because she had read many novels about love, while I had been watching TV shows about cars that can turn into robots.)

As in love, so in life: some blessed few marry their high school sweethearts and pursue their childhood dream jobs, and good for them. Everyone else has to complete a lifelong project of figuring out who they are and what they do, and that usually involves dating deadbeats and working dead-end jobs along the way. It ain’t easy, but it also ain’t impossible.

“FRIENDLY”

The other day I ran past a courthouse with a big group of people milling around outside. They were all grinning and taking pictures, so at first I thought they had just won some big class action lawsuit. But as I got closer I saw they were holding envelopes and waving tiny American flags and I realized, my God, these people just became US citizens.

I got so choked up I almost had to cut my run short, but fortunately I don’t run that fast and so I don’t need much oxygen. I wanted to go up to each of them and give them a hearty, sweaty handshake and tell them:

“I’m so glad you’re here! I don’t know if they told you in there, but we’re all trying to do something crazy here, which is to build a place where we believe there’s somewhere for everyone. We have never once in our history even come close to doing this. We’re not close now. But the fact that you’re here means we haven’t failed completely, and maybe with your help we’ll succeed.”

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I let them have their moment uninterrupted, even though being accosted by a lunatic on the street is perhaps the most American welcome that anyone can get.

When I got home, I dug out an old piece of family ephemera: my great-grandfather’s World War I draft registration card from 1918. He had arrived in the US five years earlier and he didn’t have citizenship yet, so Dominico Pizzoferrato duly indicated on the form that he was “an alien.” Then, clearly unsatisfied with his options and wanting to explain himself better, he drew a line and wrote another word: “friendly.”

All I can think is: me too, man. Me too.

1. You always have to be careful interpreting tiny percentages in surveys because of the Lizardman Constant—a few people will always give the most ridiculous answer because they’re crazy, they want to troll you, etc. I don’t think these estimates are super precise, but I also don’t think all of these respondents are Lizardmen because I’ve met people with each of these rare preferences.

2. Some of this diversity is deliberate: there’s a sizable contingent of contrarians among us who delight in disliking popular things. Indeed, one such insufferable person writes the blog you’re reading right now. As a kid, I refused to read the final Harry Potter book because it had gotten “too popular,” and every day I thank God that the internet allows annoying people like me to make a living.

3

“We didn’t stop laughing the entire time”

“Loved it. Don’t know what critics’ have problem with.”

“It was amazing hilarious yet heartwarming at the same time 100% recommended”

4. The limitations of personality testing is a post for another time.

5. From Wikipedia:

“Let me at ‘em” is Cliffjumper’s motto. His eagerness and daring have no equal. He is driven by a desire to win the battle against the Decepticons. Finds Earth terrain a hindrance. One of the fastest Autobots, and often uses his speed to draw fire away from others. Shoots “glass gas” which makes metal as brittle as glass. His recklessness often leads to actual blow-outs and situations too dangerous for him to handle.

He was voiced by Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem, who you probably know better as the voice of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, or as the radio host of American Top 40. This is all just to say that Cliffjumper is a perfectly reasonable namesake for your first child.