Cogs in the Wheel.

Hollow Crown — Isaac Gracie 🎧

There are two things I've wanted to write about for quite some time. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other, yet my brain insists they're neighbours.

Read till the end.

There was this gloomy evening back in university. Nothing particularly bad had happened. No failed exams. No heartbreaks. No catastrophes. Yet every single one of us walked into the flat carrying the same inexplicable heaviness. We gathered in what my roommates jokingly called the Parisian Salon, my room, for no apparent reason other than existing in the same melancholy. I looked around and finally asked, "What's wrong with everyone?" One shrugged. Another said he had no idea. Someone suggested we were all fine a couple of hours ago. Then it hit me. Perhaps the problem was precisely that nothing had happened. Ordinary days sometimes leave behind the loudest silence.

I connected my laptop to the speakers and Lack of Color by Death Cab for Cutie came on shuffle. One friend lit a cigarette. Another buried himself in my lap pillow. One somehow became fascinated by my stamp collection, which still raises questions to this day. I made Moroccan mint tea with an irresponsible amount of sugar, and gradually the room remembered how to breathe again. We started talking about childhood, embarrassing school memories, impossible crushes, teachers we'd never forgotten, and all those tiny stories that somehow survive while entire semesters disappear.

Then I noticed something rather unsettling.

Nobody was actually listening.

One story would end, another would immediately begin, almost as if everyone had been patiently waiting for their turn rather than genuinely hearing the previous one. There were no questions. No curiosity. No lingering on someone else's memory before introducing your own. It wasn't rude. It wasn't intentional. It was simply human. We often mistake silence for listening when, in reality, we're just rehearsing our next sentence. Since that night I've tried, emphasis on tried, to listen differently. Not to reply. Not to relate everything back to myself. Just to let someone else's story exist for a moment before borrowing the conversation again. It's astonishing how rare that has become.

Looking Down on Sociology.

The second thing has been quietly bothering me for years. People are strangely comfortable looking down on sociology.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard someone call it an "easy" discipline, usually moments before confidently making sweeping claims about human nature. Ironically, understanding people might be one of the hardest things we ever attempt. Atoms behave more consistently than we do. Human beings contradict themselves before breakfast.

That is precisely what makes sociology fascinating.

It refuses to believe that people can be explained by a single variable. Culture, history, class, language, institutions, family, gender, economics, geography. None of them work in isolation. Pull on one thread and five others move with it. Human beings are wonderfully inconvenient.

Margaret Mead challenged assumptions about gender by showing how dramatically different societies organise themselves. Marx examined class and exposed tensions many preferred to ignore. W. E. B. Du Bois dismantled pseudo-scientific ideas about race while revealing the realities of racial inequality. Durkheim demonstrated that even something as profoundly personal as suicide could reveal social patterns larger than any individual story. Whether one agrees entirely with their conclusions is almost beside the point. They all insisted on the same idea. People cannot be understood in isolation.

Perhaps that's why I've always liked Deleuze and Guattari's image of the rhizome. We don't grow in neat, predictable lines. We branch. We double back. We contradict ourselves. We borrow ideas, abandon them, rediscover them years later, and somehow call the whole thing a personality.

Human beings are beautifully untidy.

Maybe that's why they remain worth studying.

And worth listening to.