uniquecorn

So I’m lying here waiting for the Panadol to take me away and I realised that I’ve learned a lot about life these past few weeks. If you’re reading this, it isn’t about what happened earlier, just jotting down a concept.

I’ve been thinking about social karma (my own term copyright uniquecorn 2014) and I think I’ve got it figured out. In the real world there’s law and punishment. Likewise, in the realm of social interactions there are unseen laws and punishments but also a huge deal of social ethics. Because social laws aren’t apparent, people take it on themselves to create social ethics. And these come with their own form of punishment as well.

The reason I call it social karma is because unlike law, some social actions come with rewards. Rewards that make your social karma snowball. People with a high amount of social karma with other people (it’s different for different people) tend to have more friends / are more likeable. What’s funny is that it snowballs without you doing anything sometimes because word gets around. Also it’s a slippery slope for the same reason.

Bullying / rejection is caused by negative social karma. Its a form of social punishment for not following the unseen social guidelines. There’s also another factor called social influence. The higher your social karma, the higher your influence. This can allow you to lower other people’s social karma by influencing people that really like you.

So that’s surface level social karma but it gets more messed up when you bring relationships into the picture. Every decision you make has a ripple effect. People are always affected either in a good way or a bad way.

Earlier this year I tried to make a city generator to create citizens and artificial relationships and stuff. It was super simple because I merely paired people if they had common interests or traits that worked well. There’s also an attractiveness value and an alignment value. At the time I hadn’t come up with social karma yet so… It was pretty uninteresting. Also, I couldn’t balance birth rates and I always ended up with a baby boom and overpopulation.

When you bring in relationships and love, another factor that wasn’t so important comes into play. Social priority. Its sort of a multiplier to social karma and causes people to act irrationally in the favour of the person with the highest priority to them. People start to model themselves after people with social priority as well and lose their identity.

With all these factors and the ripple effect in place you can see how every action is important and the fluctuating levels of social karma are amazing. Considering that the human mind can manage only about 150 relationships with people at a time (non-romantic) each person has around 150 values stored in their brain of social karma. And the values are all affecting one another which in turn affect other peoples social karma lists. That’s pretty nice.