A smile is—if ever so briefly—a convergence of two worlds.

The force of social inertia is seriously underestimated.

Whether we have a proclivity for formal education or not, we cannot deny our inextricable relationship with learning, nor can we deny that we need it and find it useful. Through learning, for instance, upon hearing a noise whose origin we cannot visibly discern, we still often automatically know which noises we can ignore, those which we should run toward and attend to, and those...from which we should run like hell! This inaction vs. action, and valence of action, can be applied to myriad other everyday encounters, whose facilitation we owe due respect to our ability to learn, associate, and detect covariance of stimuli.

It may be a mistake to conclude that a feeling of not (yet) belonging necessarily means that you are in the wrong place.

When we are motivated to form an impression, in general, or one of a particular valence, more specifically- we unintentionally activate a biased information processing system that will give us exactly what we are looking for. The on-line processing mode will encode information differently, and will both retrieve early informational entries more often and bias subsequent evaluations based on an unrepresentative recall of information, contra to what the complete, objective information set would offer. This is the science behind what many of us knew all along: if you really want to be accurate, you can't go in with expectations! Easier said than done...

Perhaps our dominance dominates...even ourselves.

Structure soaks up uncertainty. That we do create such structure, does that make us sagacious...or cowards?