What is it about embarrassing moments that give them such a latch on memory?
I’m taking the plunge into online gamine with World of Warcraft. At Eileene’s urging, I signed up with The Older Gamers, an Australia-centered group devoted to games despite the difficulties of job, kids, and slowing reflexes.
Membership qualifications are not stringent. Applicants must be at least 25 and must agree not to behave like jerks. Application is a two-step process: signing up for the web site generally, which only requires a name, and signing up for inclusion in the various discussion groups, which requires posting a statement of age and a declaration that the Acceptable Use Policy and FAQ have been dutifully read. The applicant is encouraged to add some information helpful in coordinating group participation, like which games he intends to play, and at what times, but that’s optional. Barring some kind of remarkable glitch, a moderator will have the applicant set up within twenty-four hours.
Simple, right? And yet I managed to screw them up twice. The first time, I misunderstood what we were supposed to do, so I wrote up a more concise second post, with a checklist in another window just to make sure I got it right. Extra careful, I hit the “preview” button, just to ensure that the post looked fine, but on hitting the “back” button on my browser, to confirm the post, I discovered it had been erased. So I typed it in again, but without the checklist, which I’d closed in the meantime, and the second time, I still failed to state my age.
Never patient with my own mistakes, I’m just furious about this one. It's embarrassment that does it. Way to make a good first impression, Mike!
The older I get, the better I get at just letting go of things I shouldn’t get upset about; usually, I can even head off an impending tantrum. But, two days later, I’m still angry about it. Just logging in to a newsgroup – any newsgroup – is enough to get me in a snit for twenty, thirty minutes. All the zen oneness I can muster won’t let the irritation dissipate. Embarrassment gives memory long legs, length second only to those of a catchy jingle. I can still ruin my mood for an hour or more recalling the time I was wrapping up a concert and completely blanked out on a guest group’s name when it came time to thank them. I can remember wetting my pants on the long walk home from first grade one February day as clearly as I can remember last night’s dinner. I remember both words that knocked me out of annual spelling bees (kimono, character), who spelled them properly, and exactly what the room looked like; I can’t remember either of my victories.
How quickly can you recall vividly humiliating moments?
Oh. Sorry. Anyway, you take my point. Why are our brains wired that way? It can’t be just for survival value: embarrassingly stupid mistakes are worth memories to avoid repeating them… but so are not-so-stupid mistakes, which can be far more dangerous yet less clearly recalled. I have a hard time believing that humiliation is more harmful to our breeding chances than, say, getting eaten by a saber tooth, even for a species as social as ours. Maybe we just like to be miserable.