Late night, very sleepy, driving home after dinner. I was trying to explain to a friend, how I can tell if someone has got “it”. “I’ve got it”, I say. “My sister has got ‘it’”. “There’s this dear friend of mine who is it personified”. “You’ve got ‘it’ too”, I say. I can tell.

The “it” in question here, is personality traits. You’ll have seen people who’re “it”. Quick to laugh, constantly making jokes. But not just any jokes- really far-fetched jokes that come from their private train of thought, made without context. Here’s an example. The same friend was in the car with me yesterday, and noticed a moon in the sky, at 6pm. “Interesting, we’ll have to patch the server”, he says. I like the joke. I understand where it came from. Minecraft is known for its sunrises and sunsets. If a game like Minecraft had a bug that caused the moon to rise at an incorrect time, it’ll have to be “fixed”, and older versions of the game would have to be “patched”. The last piece- imagine that the reality is a simulation or a video game, and a patch would fix the moon.

A person who has “it” makes connections between seemingly unrelated things, and then says those out loud, to an audience that has clearly not made those connections. This is even more fun when two people in a conversation are like this, they’ll be able to figure those connections out. If they can’t, they’ll encourage each-other’s tomfoolery, going off on tangents, catapulting the conversation into larger and larger orbits of insanity. Their writing will also go of in tangents, involve parenthesis (or footnotes), because their thoughts form a tree, not a line. They’ll have an eye for detail, and remember very specific details both pertinent and nonpertinent, about past events. They’ll be unabashedly silly, and act like kids. They’ll know exactly what you are talking about, and will get very excited. Their inner monologue sometimes asserts dominance, and escapes their mouth unfiltered. All of this will be an expression of pure, joyous innocence. The laughter that rings out is never malicious, and most of their darker humour is self-deprecating.

Around people who have got “it”, I can be in my element, put out my nonsense, and have it appreciated.

This, however, isn’t the first time I’ve thought of some people as having “it”, and not others.

A few years ago, my terminology for having “it”, was “are they meta?”. Metathinking is “thinking about thinking”: going a level above and observing one’s own thought process. My fascination with this came from reading a particular kind of books: books like Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In practice, a “meta” person was someone who “got it”- someone who could articulate their thought process- the intentions, its meanderings, its failures and its insights. Someone who could put themselves under a microscope, and describe their own behaviour. Another manifestation of this (or so I thought) was mathematical, descriptions of situations, formulating them as optimization problems, dissecting their every aspect. The use of words like “maximize X”, “constraint”, “min-max”, “objective function” are common here. I had long, clever conversations with my “meta” friends- analyzing parts of my life or theirs, about whether we were doing the “optimal thing” in a particular situation, and relating with their thought process, predicting what they’re going to say next, rejoicing in the knowledge that I knew exactly what they were talking about.

A less charitable word for “meta” is “overthinker”. A lot of these meta friends were overthinkers, restless and anxious. I’ve become aware of two big metathinking fallacies. The first one, which my roommate pointed out to me, is assuming that people who can’t express meta-thoughts also don’t have them. “Its not that they don’t have these ideas” he said “Just that we had the environment which made us articulate does not make us special”. The second, which came out of a conversation with my sister- is that beyond entertainment, and the joy of going down rabbit holes, metathinking adds little. Take metathinking away, and you’ll end up taking nearly the same actions. The act of formulation might not change your decisions. And if you are a worrier, overthinking is unnecessary pain. And like guilt, if I were able to get the same improvements without the suffering, I would. I call this idea “suffering is not a necessary ingredient”.

But “meta” was neither the first nor the last of my many classifications.

A third prominent way in which I have classified people, is passion. “It doesn’t have to be something I like”, I’ll say. “But they need to really like something, that makes them work hard”, the person I’m speaking to will continue. And I’ll go “EXACTLY!”. They should be obsessed with something, they should to care deeply. They should take an interest. They should want to get good. In a world where ability is not evenly distributed, and the fruits of labour are late, sour, or forever lost to the winter, passion becomes the one thing that you do control. And I make it my yardstick, my stated classification procedure for deciding who I like. I’m surrounded by people with diverse interests- fitness, their work, art, music, literature, food, culture, other people’s romantic lives, niche hobbies, spirituality (a word that I like to avoid because it smells like a put-down of religion). People are at their best when they are excitedly talking about something that they love, and hearing such talk is endearing.

There’s other things that I can think of- “people who read”, “people who have done hard things”. I’m sure there’ll be others.

You might have noticed by now- these are all ways of identifying people who are like me. After not finding “my people” for a while, and then having my life flooded with more nice people than I could hope for, I treasure a sense of belonging, of being understood. What I’m doing with all these classifications is saying “my friends are like me! I can relate to them! I enjoy being around them!”.

Who would want to think themselves as “not funny”, “not clever”, or “not passionate”? In their own head, everyone will have made these classifications, at some point, finding marks to identify their tribes by. Others will have their own versions- “cracked”, “chill”, “vibes”.

Here’s the kicker- I truly cannot think of anyone I know, who does not have something interesting about them. Be curious, ask, pay attention, and something intriguing will come out.

Many times have I been pleasantly surprised. I’ve had someone who’s generally reserved talk about philosophy. I’ve had a less-studious person tell me about how they find it easier to study at night, when things are quiet, and that “everyone has to find their zone”. I’ve discovering a great sense of good-natured humour in someone that I thought was “vanilla”.

In fact, even curiosity or attention doesn’t have to be deliberate. People are interesting. There is joy in conversation, in knowing about everyone’s colorful traits, flaws, dreams, vendettas, vices.

NPC, short for “Non Player Character” is a term borrowed from Role-Playing Games, used in a derogatory way. It refers to a lack of personality, or identity, or character. I’ve used it in my time, mostly in jest. I was wrong.

There are no Non-Player Characters in the real world.