Babies - why are they so cool?

Babies.

They are cute.

Everybody likes babies. If you think about it, that's pretty weird. Babies wake you up at night, cry when you're trying to spend quality time with the internet, never offer to help clear the table, and never notice how you've been losing weight. They vomit right on you and instead of being like "oh my goodness I am so sorry!" they're like "Now I'm hungry again. Feed me."

So I was thinking about this and wondering what it is that makes babies enjoyable despite it all. A big part of it is, of course, the biological imperative. Somewhere in our brains we're wired to find squishy things with huge eyes adorable - that's why when we hear about baby seals being clubbed we say "Oh no!!!" and not "Yay! Free sealburgers!"

But there's more than that. Specifically, the following three things:

1. Babies are easily excited

It's fun to be around someone who's experiencing something for the first time and is really excited about it. Babies are like that all the time:

2. When babies smile, it means something

I can be somewhat socially oblivious. But even I realize that sometimes when people smile at me, they aren't really smiling.

Babies don't do that. They have so little sense of social decorum (see the vomiting thing) that they never smile just because they're supposed to. If you make a baby smile:

... you know it means something.

3. You don't know what they're thinking

Who knows what goes on in babies' brains? Nobody. Which is a wonderful thing, because then we can project whatever we'd like.

I suspect that if they could talk, we might enjoy them a bit less: