Left Hemisphere: Scoundrel

Unchecked by the right hemisphere, this guy disgusts us, courtesy of the left hemisphere

The left hemisphere of your brain is a miserable little tyrant, a penny-ante dictator strutting around in the gray matter.

Don’t believe me? Look at the everyday modern life that the left hemisphere has given us. It’s one big prick-fest, a carnival of impatience and irritation where every glitch in the machine sets us off like a pack of rabid Chihuahuas. Sure, most folks don’t go around screaming at baristas. They’re “nice.” They hold doors, tip well, and post heart emojis on X.

But deep down, they instinctively think like pricks.

Let’s get real for a minute, you and me, like we’re sitting on a sagging porch with a bottle of cheap bourbon. Ever been stuck behind an old codger shuffling along at a glacier pace? Maybe you’re late for a flight, dodging through the airport like it’s the last chopper out of Saigon, and there’s this guy, all tremors and orthopedic shoes, clogging up the works. You feel it, don’t you? That little spike of annoyance, sharp as a tack in your shoe. Oh, you shove it down quick, scold yourself for being a jerk, but it was there, wasn’t it? A flicker of disgust, like catching a whiff of sour milk.

Or how about those motorized scooter brigades at the big-box stores, clogging the aisles like a parade of human landfills, too corpulent to traverse that Trail 1 Hike to the Doritos.

You’re telling me you’ve never felt a twinge of scorn at such things? If you say no, you’re either a liar or a saint, and I ain’t betting on the latter. The rest of us, we’re stuck with it—this left-hemispheric reflex that turns every inconvenience into a personal affront.

The left hemisphere is a bean-counter, a stopwatch-wielding bureaucrat obsessed with getting from Point A to Point B without any detours. It loves tasks, checklists, and the smug satisfaction of a job done fast. Efficiency is its god, and anything that gums up the gears—old folks, fatsos, the whole messy pageant of human frailty—is anathema. That old man in the crosswalk? He’s not just slowing you down; he’s a slow-gaited rebuke to the left hemisphere’s strong preference for a frictionless world. Your brain registers him as a bug in the system, and bugs need squashing.

But it’s worse than that. It’s not just the slowpokes and scooter-bound that set off the alarms. It’s anything that doesn’t fit the script.

The left hemisphere craves the predictable, the tidy, the known. It’s why we’ve paved over half the planet and turned our cities into sterile grids of glass and concrete. Unusualness—a stranger’s accent, a wild idea, or just some guy in a tattered coat muttering to himself—throws a wrench in the works. It’s uncertainty, and the left hemisphere hates uncertainty like a cat hates a bath.

So what happens? We flinch. We sneer. We get that little curl of the lip when we pass someone who doesn’t match the program. I’ve felt it, and so have you, unless you’re living in a cave with no mirrors. It’s not something we’re proud of, but it’s there, simmering under the surface: a low-grade disgust that’s the calling card of a culture drunk on order and control. The left hemisphere doesn’t just want success; it wants to erase anything that’s different.

This is what we’ve come to: a world where the left hemisphere’s pettiness has been elevated to ordinary daily life. We’ve traded wonder for spreadsheets, mystery for metrics, and now we’re cogs in a machine of instinctive venom.

The irony? That old guy, that weirdo, the scooter acrobat, those other glitches in your perfect day? They’re the ones reminding us we’re still human.

Too bad the left hemisphere’s too busy being a prick to notice.