What’s Wrong With You Today?

Saturday afternoon at Costco is not exactly a private shopping experience, but nothing particularly unusual is happening. Mark finds a parking space, grabs a cart, and joins several hundred other people who have apparently all decided they need blueberries, paper towels, and enough olive oil to provision a small restaurant.

He makes his way through the store without much trouble grabbing coffee, oatmeal, frozen fruit, and the enormous bag of nuts his wife likes. Then he heads toward the back of the store and reaches the rotisserie chickens.

A man has stopped his cart sideways in the aisle while examining the chickens. Mark stops behind him. The man picks up one chicken, inspects it carefully, puts it back, then picks up another one. Mark stares at him and thinks, Are you kidding me?

There is plenty of room to go around, which Mark knows because that's what he eventually does, steering past the cart with considerably more force than the maneuver requires. 

“Unbelievable,” he mutters.

His wife looks over. “What?”

“Nothing.”

They keep walking.

A few minutes later, a woman is moving slowly in the center of the aisle in front of them while looking at her shopping list. Mark follows her for approximately six seconds before deciding she is another person who has somehow reached adulthood without learning that other humans exist.

“Just go around her,” his wife says.

“I’m trying.”

“You seem mad.”

“I'm not mad.”

At the cookie sample area, someone parks their cart blocking the stand. Near the bakery, a kid is making a repetitive squeaking noise with something in the cart. At checkout, the person in front of them doesn't begin looking for a credit card until the cashier has already announced the total. By now Mark has reached a conclusion. People are incredibly annoying.

This isn't something he usually believes. In fact, three days earlier he had been in this exact Costco after work. It was crowded then too. People stopped their carts in stupid places, children made noises, someone stood in front of the cheese for so long that Mark eventually walked around and came back later, but he barely noticed. Today everyone seems incompetent.

His wife notices.

“What is wrong with you today?”

“Nothing is wrong with me. Everyone is just in the way.”

This answer doesn’t appear to satisfy her.

They load the groceries into the car. Mark gets behind the wheel while his wife opens the giant container of cashews they just bought and hands him some. He eats a handful, then another, and they stop for something to drink on the way home. Twenty minutes later they're talking about what to make for dinner. The citizens of Costco have somehow ceased being a problem.

What had skipped Mark’s mind as he shopped was that he'd been awake since 4:30 that morning. He had coffee when he got up but never ate breakfast. By the time they reached Costco it was almost two in the afternoon. The slight headache he'd been ignoring all morning had been getting worse, and he'd spent most of the day running errands.

Today’s Costco population was actually not that remarkable. The man with the chicken wasn’t the first to examine multiple fowl. The woman with the shopping list wasn't moving at an historically unprecedented speed. The kid wasn't the first child to make an irritating noise in a warehouse. The machine processing all of them was running under undesirable physical conditions.

This is where the Body enters the Overreaction Machine. The body has an unusual role because it isn't simply another component in the choosing architecture. It supplies information to the machine—hunger, pain, fatigue, heat, tension—but its current condition also changes the operating conditions under which the entire machine runs.

We tend to overlook this because behavior invites much more interesting explanations. Someone is unusually irritable and within minutes we can be discussing stress, personality, relationships, emotional regulation, or the disturbing possibility that this is simply who they really are. Before we analyze the specimen's childhood, however, it might be worth asking whether he slept last night.

Sometimes the difference between a perfectly reasonable human and someone who believes civilization has collapsed beside the rotisserie chickens is not personality. It's the same machine running in a different body.