Social Convexity

Do you know what I think is cool?

(If you guessed "pizza", "porn", or the "Portland Trail Blazers": you get partial credit. It's not what I had in mind here, though, and please remember I do like some things that don't start with "p".)

I think gravity is cool.

More specifically--or more relevantly for this blog--I think that gravity wells are cool.

Gravity wells are (as far as my undereducated-in-hard-sciences monkey brain can understand them) representations of the effect that matter has on everything around it.

Space with no significant mass can be represented as a flat sheet, and when you add an object (a moon, or a planet, or a star, or a black hole, or the million backwards-baseball-cap-wearing dudes I want to shoot out into space) to that plane, you get a bend. A more massive object creates a deeper indentation, with a black hole (which has a singularity of density) creating an infinitely deep well.

I think that's about right.

In any case, the universe interacts with these indentations. They can influence how other objects move and can even bend light.

What if people are ... social wells? They influence people and institutions and events to varying degrees. Some people do a great job of building relationships (of whatever kind) because of their social concavity breadth and depth.

While a concavity can be an indentation on the surface, a convexity is something that pops up OUT of that surface. A bulge, if you will.

I don't know that are gravity bulges, but if we extend the notion of social concavities to include social convexities, I think it gets a bit more interesting.

How might a social convexity manifest itself? A cold demeanor. A distance from other people. An unwillingness to go out of one's way to help others. A physical deformity, perhaps. All things that can help push people away.

Would these rippled in the social plane be absolute or relative? Part of the beauty of gravity wells (it seems to me) is that they are pretty universally applicable (although I'm sure at the quantum level things break down; they always seem to). But for a person: wouldn't one person find a racist dude to be a convexity while another (fellow racist) would find him to be a concavity?

Perhaps. I don't have all the answers (for once).

I just think about my bulge. Or, rather, my social convexity (or, indeed, maybe I have increased social convexity because I think about my bulge) and I wonder if I should be trying harder to have more friends or trying harder to build stronger ties to existing friends.

Or maybe I shouldn't worry about it, because some fellas are convex and some ain't.