The Third Wheel Effect

Everyone has been the odd man out at some point in their life.

Personally, my odd-wheel record is seven.  Third wheel's bad.  Fifth wheel's rough.  Seventh wheel?  Uggh!  I don't know how high the official world record is, though.  I have a theory that after a certain point, the individual relationships start breaking down and it's impossible to have an odd wheel.  I've yet to find anyone willing to test this theory for me.

I've been asking myself lately just why it is that being a third wheel is so depressing.  I don't mind being alone.  I actually prefer a lot of the time.  But when I'm the third wheel, I feel more alone than when I'm by myself.  Why?

Most people, when you ask them this question, will give you a rather simple answer.  They will say that seeing other people together is a constant reminder of what you don't have.  I think they're close, but not quite there.  If that were the case, watching most of my favorite shows such as How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory would make me feel alone too, but they don't.  What is it about being around actual people?  Why is it so much worse than seeing them on TV?

For example, sitting at home, watching a movie involving a party, knowing full well that you are alone and other people are out together, is not depressing.  Yet being at a party, and not interacting with anyone else, but sitting alone, is depressing.

People will again offer a simple explanation to this as well:  When it's on TV, you don't have the option of being a part of it.  It's the proximity that hurts so much.

As per usual, I don't think it's that simple.  I do, however, think that the Third Wheel Effect can be explained in three simple words:  Imagination vs. Reality.  (Honestly, I think this is the summation of many issues in most people's lives.)

As a math major, I write a lot of proofs.  Anytime you write a proof, you start by defining what you're working with.  (In fact, a lot of the time, simply pushing definitions into one another will give you the proof.)  This is essentially what I'm going to do here.

I have a large imagination.  It terrifies me.  The best way I have of explaining it is by comparing it to fire.  If it is controlled, it can be an incredible and useful tool in limitless endeavors.  However, when it gets out of control, it destroys everything in its path, and is incredibly difficult to stop.  Just ask any firefighter.

Everyone has some imagination, and just about everyone has lost control of it at some point.  It's what makes you see things out of the corner of your eye when you're alone in your room.  It's what makes you feel like someone's watching you when there's no one around.  It's what fills the darkness with terrifying images of monsters and murderers when a child is trying to sleep.

Imagination is a fire fueled by emptiness.  This is why we fear the dark and the silence.

I firmly believe this.  When an artist looks at an empty canvass, imagination seeks to fill it with paint.  When a sculptor sees a block of clay, empty of all uniqueness, imagination is what seeks to fill it with characteristics.  When a writer gets hold of a character with a blank and empty future, imagination seeks to fill it with adventure.  When a musician hears the empty, echoing silence of a room, imagination seeks to fill it with music.  When a child sees all the empty space in the closet, imagination seeks to fill it with monsters.

So, then, how do we control imagination?  Creativity.

Some of the least imaginative people in the world come up with the most creative solutions to problems.  Similarly, some of the most imaginative people in the world live boring, mundane lives because they cannot come up with a way to use it.  Creativity and imagination are not the same thing.  Creativity is the ability to control and wield what imagination you have.  And, like any skill, it takes training.

Creativity is a much more conscious effort than the innate power of imagination.  This is why things get scarier at night.  You start easing your brain into doing less work, and one of the things that typically shuts down first is creativity.  Without creativity, imagination runs free and unbridled, filling the dark and the silence with whatever it can.

But what does any of this have to do with being a third wheel?  This is where we must jump over to the other, much uglier word:  Reality.

The philosopher Descartes once tried to determine what things were undoubtedly true.  In order to do this, he doubted everything.  I mean EVERYTHING.  Then, he threw out whatever he couldn't prove.  It got to the point that he threw out the entire universe, essentially offering the idea that we could be living in the Matrix.  That is, as he explained it, some demon could be manipulating his brain and making him experience things that weren't actually there.  All of this, he said, made him sad.  He then decided that since he was sad, he must exist.  This has since led to interesting philosophical discussions and paradoxes.

We can't prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that anything is real.  To be honest, as best I can tell, we typically determine whether something we're sensing is real by whether or not someone else senses it.

Think about the movie A Beautiful Mind (HUGE spoiler alert).  In his reality, he was working for the government.  He had this college roommate with a daughter who he watched grow up.  In everyone else's reality, he was nuts, because he saw people that no one else did.  Who's to say that these people didn't exist?  Everyone.  What makes someone crazy is if everyone else's view of reality contradicts their own.

Reality is determined by the majority.

Imagination is constantly seeking to fill the emptiness around you.  Without anyone else there to deny what you are sensing, whether that be the feeling that someone's watching you or the bump you heard in the basement, who's to say what's real?

As a third wheel or the wallflower sitting at the edges of a party, you are alone.  There is no one connected to you, thus you are just as alone as when there's no one around you.  Where those connections should go, there is an emptiness.  Imagination floods in and tries to consume the emptiness, to fill it.

When you are completely alone, there's no one else there to say that imagination isn't filling that emptiness.  There's no one there to confirm that you are alone, thus who's to say you are actually alone?  Without anyone else there, you're free to float on a cloud of imagination and forget the real world.  On the other hand, when you are alone around other people, there is someone there to ground you in reality.  They can confirm that you are alone, and you accept this reality.

It's not being alone that makes you lonely.  It's accepting that you are alone.

I'm not saying that people consciously come to these conclusions.  I don't think that people decide to feel lonlier because of conscious confirmation that they are alone.  These things occur subconsciously with you ever realizing them.  That's what makes it so scary.

Is there anything you can do about this?  I don't know.  All my experiments in this endeavor have failed.  The only solution I've found is zoning out.  That lets you escape away from even your senses.  With this wide open emptiness in your mind, imagination is free to flood in and fill it with a new reality.  A new world.  A Whole New World.  A better world.

Maybe crazy people have it right.  Maybe we should all just throw out this world and let our imaginations build a new one.  Maybe reality really is just for people who don't have enough imagination to come up with anything better.