Why it feels good to send a rude birthday card

We like to misbehave a little bit

It really does feel good, to give a card that’s offensive, rude or naughty.

But why do you think this is?

You know the feeling, you can’t help feel a little bit nervous and apprehensive; you’re watching them open the envelope and you are not sure how they’re going to take it.

You’re starting to regret it a little bit as you think they might be angry and offended, but at the same time you like the excitement of being naughty.  Of doing something you know you really shouldn’t.

You don’t know how they’re going to respond and you mostly hope they’ll just giggle but also the naughty part of you wants a slightly more dramatic reaction.

 

But why?

You’ve probably never really thought about what is going on here; why this sort of misbehaving feels so good.

I think the answer to this lies in our ancestry and has something to do with how we live today.

The way I like to think about this is to look at the way that humans have evolved biologically and compare that to how our lifestyles have changed.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that humans have been around for the last hundred thousand years, and let’s use a metre ruler to represent that timeline.

Each mm therefore represents a hundred years and a cm is a thousand years.

If you look at it that way, for that 99cm of this timeline, we were free to run about with our balls and flaps dangling, free to fuck, attack or be who we want and to say whatever we like when we feel like it.  This has been the normal way of living for almost the entire history of human life.

That is until the last few hundred years – until the last cm on this metre ruler.

Now look at us.

Since school were taught to stand in a neat line, speak when we’re spoken to, put ticks in little boxes and conform in every possible way, even down to the clothes that we wear and how we address people.

Then we grow up, leave school, get a job where we continue to act the compliant little cog in a big corporate machine.

For our entire lives we’re forced to conform and comply. This applies to what we eat, how we travel, what we say (and don’t), what we wear, how we communicate and pretty much every facet of everyday life.

Until the last hundred or so years I can see why this was necessary: the country needed thousands of good little workers, but not so much anymore.

Nonetheless though, it still seems that the main purpose of schools is to create good little workers, where any spark of creativity or individualism has been scraped out.

 

So where does this leave us?

Good question.

All of a sudden (from an evolutionary viewpoint) it’s all changed. Now we have to stand in line and behave properly; it’s left many of us feeling claustrophobic and trapped. 

Probably for most of us, we don’t even know why, all we know is that we have the claustrophobic itchy feeling that we need to scream, run around naked, do something wild and escape.

Of course, we don’t do that though, we carry on being polite, behaving like a good little citizen and behaving properly.

 

What does this have to do with sending a rude birthday card?

It’s about an expression of being an individual and doing and saying what we want. Saying something that we’re not really allowed to do. It’s releasing a tiny bit of pressure and giving us a brief moment of being the sort of human we’ve evolved to be.

 

So what else can we do to release more of that pressure?

Sign up to our email list, join the community and start to live again!

If you have any questions about the service I provide just contact me via dan@mrinappropriate.co.uk, 01138730688 or the chat thing at the bottom of mrinappropriate.co.uk.

 

A couple of reviews:

You can see these reviews on the reviews page:

“I absolutely love all the items I bought from here, cannot wait to see the faces of the recipients 🙈🙈😂 so so funny really fast postage and greatly packed. Can’t wait to see what else he comes up with!” – Kirsty Millar.