Lots of us were born into towns full of people we couldn’t stand. As a kid, maybe you found yourself in an elementary school classroom, packed in with two dozen kids you did not choose and who shared none of your tastes or interests. Maybe you got beat up a lot.
But, you’ve grown up. And if you’re, say, a huge DragonForce fan, you can go find their forum and meet a dozen people just like you. Or even better, start a private room with your favorite few and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who’s truly different. That’s another Old World inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek.
The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can’t stand is society. Just people with opposite tastes and conflicting personalities sharing space and cooperating, often through gritted teeth.
Fifty years ago, you had to sit in a crowded room to see a movie. You didn’t get to choose; you either did that or you missed the movie. When you got a new car, everyone on the block came and stood in your yard to look it over. You can bet that some of those people were (filtered).
Yet, on the whole, people back then were apparently happier in their jobs and more satisfied with their lives. And get this: They had more friends.
That’s right. Even though they had almost no ability to filter their peers according to common interests (hell, often you were just friends with the guy who happened to live next door), they still came up with more close friends than we have now people they could trust.
It turns out, apparently, that after you get over that first irritation, after you shed your shell of “they listen to different music because they wouldn’t understand mine” superiority, there’s a sort of comfort in needing other people and being needed on a level beyond common interests. It turns out humans are social animals after all. And that ability to suffer fools, to tolerate annoyance, that’s literally the one single thing that allows you to function in a world populated by other people who aren’t you. Otherwise, you turn emo. Science has proven it.