Why I am behavior obsessed

People's behavior is the most meaningful signal we have. It can be telling, deceptive, impactful, and this idea applies to nearly everything.

My favorite example is football. The entire determination of whether a receiver is a good route runner comes down to their ability to persuade their opposition. One step in a certain direction tells the defender what route a receiver may run, and at the same time there are mental games happening in these split seconds. A good receiver knows their movement is telling, so they throw in a juke or an unplanned step, which causes the defender to commit one way when the whole purpose of that additional step was to go the other. The fact that we can process behavior at that level of complexity is incredible to me.

Texting is another good example. How long someone takes to respond, why they take that long, the response itself, how many letters they use in a specific word, their intonation based on context, how they react to what you said. The list goes on.

This is obvious human behavior and it applies to everything. Even the things we pretend are objective are still wrapped in people. The way someone dresses for an interview is behavior. The way a professor phrases feedback is behavior. The way someone walks into a room and decides where to sit, whether they soften a question with "this might be a dumb question," whether a friend says "all good" versus "no worries" versus "lol ur fine." So much of it carries more intricacy than we acknowledge.

I've always been drawn to this because behavior feels like the only consistent language people speak, even when they're trying not to say anything at all. Expression has been difficult for me growing up, so learning why and how people behave the way they do has helped me make sense of the world. The choices people make can tell you everything about them.

All of this is a part of (over)thinking, and I'm convinced everybody with a brain and working conscience has gone through a similar thought process before. I don't think the significance of behavior's impacts are acknowledged enough, in any context.

Part of why I notice it so much is that I have a hard time not looking for the why behind things. I'm not satisfied when something is just random.

Psychologists describe an adolescent phenomenon called the imaginary audience, the idea that everyone thinks the world cares about what they're doing, leading to heightened self-consciousness. I believe this persists far deeper into adult life than those psychologists suggest, especially young adult life. I've never seriously talked to anyone my age who isn't anxious about what those around them think. The people who say they aren't are just performing harder than the rest of us, and it shows.

This is for obvious reasons, mostly the exponential progression of media presence, and it's not going away. It fades only when people realize they have more important things to care about, which usually have to do with survival or kin: rent, food, a partner, children, whatever demands priority.

It's good to care about what others think, at least those who are important to you. If someone matters to you, it's likely for specific reasons, so their opinions should carry weight.

What I'm really getting at is that behavior is the thing that sits between what someone feels and what they're willing to admit. That space is where life happens. Where misunderstandings form, where relationships deepen and where they die, where someone decides to ask for help or pretend they're fine, where someone shows you love or keeps it ambiguous so they don't get hurt. Understanding behavior, and learning how to express these observations, may help me make better decisions when I inevitably face these situations.

If you don't pay attention to behavior, you end up taking everything literally, getting confused constantly, assuming people are unpredictable when really you just haven't learned their patterns. I don't mean patterns in a manipulative way. I mean what makes people people. What makes them shut down, open up, become human. At the same time, truly believing that things are not that deep is a perspective I wish I could hold more often. Ignorance really is bliss.

My own habits have deepened this obsession. Reading is a big one. I've read my entire life, but in the last two years I've read a lot of realistic fiction, spending hours inside other people's internal monologues, which are generally reflective of the author in some way. Even though the characters aren't real, I've been trained to care about motives and context, to understand how people work. Fiction books overlap in their themes because certain themes show up in the majority of good writing: fear, love, insecurity, death, and a long list beyond that. I feel I've educated myself on how to think about these themes, despite the fact that most of them can't truly be felt without living through them.

Once you start seeing it in books, you start seeing it everywhere. You hear it in the pauses people make when they talk. You notice when someone repeats a point too many times because they're trying to convince themselves, or when you ask someone questions and they never ask you any. You just become more observant as a whole.

I think part of why I look so hard outward is that I can't fully make sense of myself. There are parts of me I can't explain. Why I care so much about certain things, why some thoughts stick for days while others vanish. Studying other people feels more legible. There seems to be a system, and sometimes you can map it, connect the dots. But it circles back. Get good enough at reading other people and you start noticing your own patterns. You don't get perfect answers, but you see yourself a little more clearly.

Every business outcome is downstream of people. Consumers buying, not buying, switching, staying, getting hooked, getting bored, recommending, quitting. People have stories in their heads about what a product says about them. They have fears, ego, habits, friction. All of it shows up in the product whether you want it to or not.

Investing sharpens this further. You can have the best market in the world, but if the founder can't recruit, can't sell, can't handle conflict, can't take feedback, none of it matters. A product with good retention will rot if the incentives inside the company are broken. A team that looks perfect on a deck will leak dysfunction into everything if the culture is built on insecurity. Numbers matter, but they're downstream of human decisions, and most of those decisions happen under stress, with imperfect information. That's when behavior becomes the thing you're actually evaluating.

That's why I get excited about studying this formally. Game theory, behavioral economics, whatever I can get my hands on. Not because I want to turn people into math problems, but the opposite. I want better language for what I'm already seeing, frameworks that help me avoid being delusional about my own interpretations. I want to separate "this is what happened" from "this is the story I'm telling myself about what happened," and understand where my biases end and reality starts, even if the line is blurry.

These loops are some of the most interesting things I can think about. Someone does something small, another person interprets it, that interpretation becomes behavior, and the reaction becomes another signal. The whole thing compounds into a relationship, a reputation, a brand, a culture, a market. All built out of tiny moments that feel insignificant in isolation.

<u>TW</u>

Rumination is strongly correlated with suicide, and I think about that a lot, because this entire piece is essentially me describing rumination on behavior and why I find it compelling.

I wonder whether being aware of it changes anything. Does naming it help you step out of it, or does it give you another layer to spiral on? I know how suicide crisis syndrome works now, and the way they describe it is terrifying. It's not always about one external problem, it's the internal loop. Thinking about thinking is the primary symptom. That phrase was rough to read.

Your brain becomes a room with mirrors, and you keep walking deeper into it, unable to find the door because you're too busy analyzing the fact that you're looking for the door.

These patterns are neverending if you let them be. I can understand how it could drive someone insane.

At the same time, I don't want to overfit meaning to everything. Some things have no meaning at all, and discerning which is which is up to each individual. That's the fun in all this. Sometimes a slow response is just a slow response. Sometimes someone is quiet because they're tired, not because they hate you. Sometimes the pattern isn't a pattern, it's just noise.

That's part of what makes evaluating behavior so hard. Signal mixed with noise mixed with your own bias mixed with their bias mixed with context neither of you even remember. The complexity is what draws me in, not because it makes life clearer, but because it makes you more aware of how unclear everything is.

I enjoy having a brain that won't shut up.

Being obsessed with behavior is the best way I know to exercise that trait. It gives my thinking somewhere to go that isn't just me looping on myself. It forces me to look outward, notice patterns, test what I assume, and stay honest about how much I don't know. I hope to apply that in my career in a way that actually matters. I want to build and back things that solve real problems.

To not be using my brain in this manner would feel like disrespect to the earth I had a 1 in 400 trillion chance of being born on in the first place.