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- #109: Let me spit in your ear.
#109: Let me spit in your ear.
Shem Opolot
February 21, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Happy Friday 🎉 It is SO SO cold. My ears and nose hurt, I’m burning through chapstick and Vaseline faster than an influencer, and I now sleep with a blanket under my blanket.
Today’s life anecdote is part of the “Manna in the Middle” series I coined thanks to a productive shower and my compulsive love of alliteration. The first post in the series was on the pillars of happiness, and the series will make more sense as a whole and less sense by parsing the individual pieces together. You know, like life.
LIFE.
Let me spit in your ear.
In Germany—a country whose people are often called rude or brusque—it’s illegal to insult someone, the punishment for which is more severe if you insult someone online. The logic being—the internet is forever, so the insultee would spend the rest of their life with egg on their face. Therefore, the insulter must pay the commensurate price.
So everyone in Germany probably has a criminal record, with evidence of time [well] served adorning their sleeves like epaulets. The longer the jail term, the longer the bragging rights because sometimes an insult is appropriate. Ausgezeichnet, if you will.
[I’m using all my intermediate to advanced German here because the World Bank doesn’t seem to care for it, and someone has to get this work.]
Die Rudemenschen also have a law against spreading malicious gossip, and this one piqued my interest.
Because gossip can be good.
Like all socio-cultural dynamics, the existence of gossip can be traced via the indubitable concept that keeps willfully ignorant Christians up at night—evolution.
You see, as our ancestors huddled around the fire, they recognized the value of large groups for their capacity to reduce the likelihood they got mauled by wild animals. This was great, but they’d later learn this meant they had to be around people. And we know how that can be.
But groups insist upon themselves.
So people live and work together, intermarry, and squabble up in the town square for theater, dignity, and representation.
And as people worked together, group projects also insisted upon themselves.
You see, for any given project that requires 5 people to complete it, it’s almost impossible to convince any one of the 5 people that their individual task isn’t the most critical. Even though sometimes the weighting of the importance of the tasks is apparent.
And based on the implicit weighting of importance—and old-fashioned human selfishness—social loafing happens. Over time, some people stop carrying their weight because they realize they can still reap all the benefits of the group work with little to no effort. Left unchecked, these people shirk responsibility for as long as they can.
But there was a solution to this social sin of social loafing.
Slowly, the diligent group members began to sit together on their lunch breaks, at the markets, at the town halls, at the weddings, and at the funerals. Together, they’d whisper somethings about how lazy the shirkers were. And those stories would spread like a game of telephone.
“He doesn’t like to work” became “his hands don’t work,” then “Ba-so and so are lazy people!” and finally, “People in such and such clan have short thumbs because the gods cursed them.”
Sound familiar?
Yes, that ridiculous story you heard about yourself that one time probably came from someone who eavesdropped on a conversation whose contents were probably a little closer to the truth.
Gossip would either cause the shirkers to be ostracized or force them back into the societal fold with renewed enthusiasm for work.
But humans have an evolutionary-busting ability to ruin everything.
So even a useful action like gossip, made to curtail social loafing, became a tool for others to elevate their position in society at the expense of others. It became a tool for social pyromaniacs who just like to watch the world burn.
The maxim here is you need people, but you’re also bad for people because you swing for the fences of your own fortune whenever you get the chance instead of finding contentment inside yourself and inside the herd.
THINGS.
A quote.
When the worries of your future envelop you like a parade of fog marching at dawn, go slowly, but keep going
A picture.
This was taken at a Haitian exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in D.C.
WORK.
Custom lists
Sometimes you have lists that only make sense to you.
For example, the sizing options of clothes in a retail store. But this could be a list of employees, some unique product categorization.
The bottom line is you want Excel to remember this list so you can summon it when you need it.
So…you want data:
To add a custom list, on a PC, Go to File > Options > Advanced > General > Edit Custom Lists. But I have a Mac, so…on a Mac, navigate to Preferences (⌘ + ,) > Custom Lists, like so:
With a custom list created, you don’t have to manually type everything. You can now do this:
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Play this game and gift rice to the World Food Program.
✅ This video explains how planes actually fly.
✅ The difference between expiry date and sell-by date.
✅ How to delegate.
✅ The scarcity of women songwriters.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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