I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human, why you do what you do.

Before you were old enough to know any real swear words,

some of the spiciest epithets hurled at your peers may have sounded like this.

Hey, no budging!

Alternately, no cutting in line, no skipping, no budding.

If you grew up in Ohio, you might have called it ditching.

In the UK, cue jumping or barging.

In Brazil, you pierced the line.

Arkansas, you broke it.

For pint-sized tweakers and the grown-ups they turn into,

the standing line evokes strong feelings about fairness, about justice.

But why?

Now is the time to insert your mouthguards,

because we are going into the dark heart of this standing line,

a place full of violence, sex, power struggles, and tiny little underbites.

When you're surfing, there is a very distinct cue for the wave. Once you start to learn the rhythms of it, you can see there

is a line for the wave. And if you break that or do what's called dropping in on somebody, that

can lead to fistfights. That's Jason Farman. When not surfing, he's a psychologist who

studies how humans wait. Well, technically, I guess he is still a psychologist while he was surfing.

The wave will break at a particular point.

And if you're too far to the left or too far to the right, you won't be able to catch that

wave.

...