09/15/2026
A new book of mine was published recently.
“The Universe’s Guide to Being a Good Human”.
This one I’m selling instead of putting out for free like some of my other works. The link to buy it and help support us on our endeavors will be in the comments.
Here’s a committee approved sample:
4. A Brief Taxonomy of Human Confusion (Kindness, Politeness, and the Thing
They Do at Funerals)
Humans possess exactly one instinct for treating each other well, and approximately four hundred
different names for it, most of which contradict one another.
Let us begin with politeness, which is the most common and least trustworthy of the bunch.
Politeness is what happens when a human wants to be perceived as good with the smallest possible
expenditure of actual goodness. It is holding a door for someone while internally timing how long
you'll have to hold it. It is saying "no, you go ahead" to a stranger at a four-way stop while quietly
resenting them for existing. Politeness is not evil. It is, in fact, load-bearing — entire societies run on
it the way engines run on oil, quietly, unglamorously, keeping the bigger parts from grinding against
each other. But it is not kindness, and humans confuse the two constantly, the way a person might
mistake a photograph of a fire for warmth.
Then there is kindness itself, which is rarer than advertised. True kindness costs something — time,
comfort, ego, a parking space you actually wanted. You can identify real kindness by a simple test
we've developed after considerable observation: did it cost the human anything, and did they do it anyway. If
yes, kindness. If no, you have most likely witnessed either politeness or a human trying to be seen
being kind, which is a separate and much noisier category we'll get to shortly.
Niceness deserves its own entry because humans treat it as a synonym for goodness when it is
often the opposite. Niceness is frequently just conflict avoidance wearing a costume. A nice human
will tell you your terrible business idea is "interesting." A kind human will tell you it's terrible, and
then help you fix it. Niceness protects the nice person's comfort. Kindness risks the kind person's
comfort for someone else's benefit. These are not close cousins. They are barely in the same family.
Now, the funeral thing.
Humans have developed, at funerals specifically, a behavior found almost nowhere else in their social
repertoire: radical, unguarded honesty about love, delivered entirely too late for the person to hear it.
At a funeral, a human will stand up and describe, in specific and moving detail, exactly what
someone meant to them — their humor, their patience, the way they made a room feel safer just by
being in it — using language so tender and precise that everyone in attendance quietly wonders why
nobody said any of this out loud while the person could still enjoy it.
This is, from our vantage point, one of the strangest things your species does. You have the capacity
for this kind of clear-eyed, specific love. You clearly have the vocabulary for it. You simply,
overwhelmingly, save it for a room where the guest of honor cannot hear a word of it.
We have theories. Grief strips away the social risk — you cannot be rejected by someone who has
died, so the truth comes out unguarded, the way it never quite does over dinner. There is also,
frankly, a deadline involved, and humans are a species that responds almost exclusively to deadlines.
Nothing produces honesty in a human like the sudden, total absence of more time.
Here, then, is the actual advice buried in this taxonomy, and it is not subtle: you have a eulogy in
you for everyone you love, right now, fully formed, ready to go. Consider delivering it while
they're still around to be embarrassed by it.
It does not need to wait for a room full of black clothing and bad coffee. It can happen on a
Tuesday. It can happen over text. It will feel strange and exposed the first time, precisely because you
have trained yourself, through decades of politeness and niceness and general social caution, to save
your best material for a room the person you're describing will never enter.
Skip the wait. The funeral version is beautiful. The version delivered in time is better.
The committee has approved this sample for your enjoyment. Though , for the sake of transparency, a small faction insisted this was not the best section to use for the sample. they were then gently reminded of the sections topic. No further arguments were given.
