- Humanist
I love people. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love humans.
8 BILLION people experience every day from a different perspective, living a different life; those are 8 billion different stories every day.
Although I fully understand that the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, I believe that every person has something beautiful about them. Every day, I go to school and meet my classmates. Some think that this would get boring quickly. Indeed, the school itself did, but not the people. I appreciate things both big and small: the dimples while smiling, a guy’s confidence, a girl’s freight of spiders, someone’s ambitions to get better and speak more eloquently, and so on.
There is so much to learn about everyone, so many stories – and they are often left untold. Some people mistake my curiosity for an attempt of violation of person boundaries, some think that I am challenging their opinions because of my thorough, investigative questions that follow after they reply: “Really? But why this and not that? Why not “foo” or “bar”?” Yet, I am just trying to grasp the people, get their mental models, acquire their way of thinking – I want to feel them. But again, sometimes I’m not given the liberty.
I love humans. As a Humanist, I am very extroverted (specifically so when I’m talking in a language I can speak well). This extroversion has certain pros and cons. Pros: I’m really easy to get along with, I try to cater my personality to you when talking, and I’m in for some small talk. As for cons: people think I’m some fruitloop asking random questions, not caring what they say… a-a-and that’s it! Nothing more! I think it’s worth it.
My humanism also encapsulates getting to know more about archetypes of people. I am a very mixed archetype of my own (I feel like this also contributes to the fruitloop impression, lol). And because I also chat with people from different countries and cultures, I get diverse mental models; this also makes my own archetype very nuanced and rare – to the point that people don’t expect completely normal things like me listening to Taylor Swift…? huh? lol. genuinely surprised.
Every humans belongs to a certain culture (at least upon birth) and has a mother tongue. I’m out for those! I love exploring cultures and learning languages. Recently, my German has been getting slightly better, making me more confident when I speak to strangers; somehow (it’s a direct correlation, to be fair) this has also enabled me to get a deeper sense of people and certain cultural aspects.
I’m really looking forward to learning French and exploring the francophone culture. However, I have so many things on my plate that I suppose I will have to postpone this relish for later – sadge (sic.; = sad)!
What I also noticed is that my gratitude, appreciation of nature and everything around, and my Humanist nature – they all developed at the same time. I’ll assume there is a direct correlation here too, since all of those are more specific versions of “appreciation” as an abstract concept.
I think this blog post contains a bone for me to pick, something to reflect on. And I hope it’s for the better (:
- Nihad Badalov
2025-11-12