Turns out, the House of Specialists is bursting at the seams with residents. In fact, we all have a room there. I'm just down the hall from you, and you. Especially special you.
This weekend, I just finished a book I had blogged about even before I read it: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.
I can report it is entertaining and informative. It may even change the way I think (which may or may not make me happy, but that is only part of the story). At one point Gilbert writes:
Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having better 'football sense' than their teammates. Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers, and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers. [p.252]
He goes on.
I suppose he could just as easily have written, "Every blogger considers himself or herself especially special, with insights more worth sharing than anyone else and insights more worthy of comments than anyone else."
Or else, why do we all bother tapping the keyboard keys, hunh?
I'm not sure this stumbling onto specialness diluted by everyone else's special specialness makes me happy or not.
I think not.
Maybe it's a topic for me and my therapist on Wednesday.
Then again, I'm a little fearful my therapist may pull a Dr. Melfi on me, just as she did on Tony Soprano. My therapist might feel that I'm using therapy simply to validate my pathological special specialness that goes by the especially special name of solipsism.
