Do you ever spit, clean your teeth, or pick your nose in public?

Fair warning: If discussions of normal bodily functions make you squeamish, this might be a good time to check your social media feeds instead. For everyone else, welcome to an honest examination of the things we do when we think no one is watching.

This week’s question from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions seems almost absurdly simple at first glance. Of course we don’t do these things in public—we’re civilized people, aren’t we? We have standards, social graces, basic human decency. We certainly don’t go around excavating our nasal cavities or launching salivary projectiles in front of other members of polite society.

And yet.

And yet, if we’re being completely honest—and what’s the point of these exercises if we’re not?—most of us have found ourselves in situations where the call of nature overrides the call of social propriety. Where the discomfort of a blocked nostril or a stubborn piece of spinach wedged between molars becomes more pressing than the theoretical judgment of strangers who may or may not be paying attention to our momentary lapse in public presentation.

I’ll admit it: I’m guilty of all three transgressions. Usually in what I call “vehicular privacy”—that magical psychological state where I convince myself that the transparent windows surrounding me in my car somehow render me invisible to the outside world. It’s the same delusion that makes people pick their noses at red lights as if their Honda Civic has suddenly developed cloaking technology.

The truth is, we’ve all been there. The real question isn’t whether we do these things, but what our patterns of public hygiene behavior reveal about the strange dance between our biological reality and our social aspirations.

The Hierarchy of Acceptable Grossness

Not all public hygiene violations are created equal. There’s a clear social hierarchy at play here, an unspoken scale of acceptability that most of us intuitively understand even if we’ve never formally articulated it.

Tooth cleaning occupies the most respectable tier of this hierarchy. Using a fingernail to dislodge a stubborn food particle isn’t just socially forgivable—it’s practically virtuous. You’re maintaining oral hygiene! You’re being considerate of others by ensuring you don’t have a chunk of broccoli announcing itself every time you smile! Sure, it’s not as elegant as excusing yourself to find dental floss, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.

We’ve all been there: sitting through a dinner meeting or family gathering, acutely aware of something lodged between our teeth, feeling it with our tongue, knowing it’s visible when we talk. The social calculation is swift and merciless—is the brief impropriety of a discrete finger-tooth interaction worse than spending the next hour as the person with food in their teeth? Most reasonable people would argue for the quick fix.

Spitting occupies the middle ground of our hygiene hierarchy. Context is everything here. Spitting into a sink? Perfectly acceptable, even expected in certain circumstances. Spitting into a designated receptacle at the dentist’s office? That’s literally what it’s for. But the casual sidewalk expectoration that was once commonplace in earlier eras now carries the social weight of a minor scandal in most contexts.

I reserve my spitting for private moments with nearby sinks, which feels like a reasonable compromise between biological necessity and social consciousness. There’s something almost quaint about the idea of public spittoons, those brass fixtures that once dotted sidewalks and saloons. We’ve gained social refinement, but we’ve also lost a certain honest acknowledgment that humans occasionally need to expel things from their mouths.

And then there’s nose-picking, the undisputed champion of social taboo in the public hygiene Olympics. This is the behavior that crosses the line from forgivable human moment to genuine social transgression. Which makes it all the more fascinating that we continue to do it anyway.

The Psychology of Perceived Privacy

The most intriguing aspect of public hygiene behavior isn’t what we do, but when and where we convince ourselves it’s acceptable to do it. We create these bubbles of perceived privacy in the middle of public spaces, mental constructs that allow us to act as if we’re alone even when we’re clearly not.

The car is the classic example of this phenomenon. Something about being surrounded by metal and glass creates the illusion of a private space, even when that space is parked in full view of pedestrians, other drivers, and security cameras. I once watched my bank manager launch what can only be described as a snot rocket across a parking lot, a magnificent display of nasal engineering that he executed with the confidence of a man who thought he was unobserved. When he realized I’d witnessed this biological performance art, I couldn’t help but give him a thumbs up and laugh. What else do you do in that moment? Pretend you didn’t see it? That somehow seems more awkward than acknowledging the shared humanity of occasionally needing to clear your respiratory passages.

But cars aren’t the only spaces where we create these privacy bubbles. Empty elevators, bathroom stalls (obviously), the corner of a parking garage, the aisle of a grocery store when you think no one else is around—we’re constantly making rapid calculations about who can see us and whether they’re paying attention.

The smartphone era has complicated these calculations immensely. We’re now living in a world where everyone is potentially documenting everything, where a moment of perceived privacy can become a viral video faster than you can say “viral video.” This has created a new layer of anxiety around public behavior, but it doesn’t seem to have eliminated the behaviors themselves. If anything, it’s made us more creative about finding truly private moments.

Cultural Cartography of Bodily Functions

What counts as acceptable public hygiene behavior varies dramatically across cultures, creating a fascinating map of social norms that reveals as much about values and assumptions as any formal cultural study.

In some cultures, the casual clearing of nasal passages is so unremarkable that it barely registers as noteworthy. In others, even the most discrete nose-touching is considered deeply inappropriate. The same action that might be completely ignored on one continent could cause genuine social offense on another.

Spitting presents an even more complex cultural landscape. In some places, it’s a normal part of daily life, especially among certain demographics or in specific contexts. In others, it’s seen as a sign of poor upbringing or lack of respect for shared spaces. The decline of public spitting in American culture over the past century represents a fascinating case study in how social norms evolve, often in response to changing understanding of public health and disease transmission.

These cultural differences matter because they remind us that our own standards of acceptable behavior aren’t universal truths—they’re learned social constructs that vary based on geography, class, generation, and context. The thing that seems obviously gross to us might be perfectly normal elsewhere, and vice versa.

Class, Context, and the Performance of Propriety

Nothing reveals the performance aspects of social propriety quite like observing how public hygiene behavior changes based on social context. The same person who would never dream of picking their nose at a business meeting might do so without hesitation while walking alone through a parking lot.

This isn’t hypocrisy—it’s social intelligence. We understand intuitively that different contexts have different expectations, different audiences, different stakes. The behavior that’s acceptable when you’re alone in your backyard becomes problematic when you’re in line at Starbucks, not because the behavior itself has changed, but because the social meaning of that behavior has shifted.

Class considerations add another layer to these calculations. What reads as casual and unpretentious in one context might be interpreted as crude or inappropriate in another. The ability to navigate these shifting expectations—to know when a discrete tooth-cleaning gesture is acceptable and when it crosses the line into social awkwardness—is itself a form of cultural capital.

But here’s what’s interesting: even people who are perfectly capable of code-switching their hygiene behavior based on social context still occasionally get caught in moments of biological urgency that override their social programming. The most refined person in the world has probably been spotted doing something that would mortify them if they knew they’d been observed.

The Honesty of Desperate Moments

Perhaps the most telling aspect of public hygiene behavior is what happens when desperation overrides social conditioning. When your nose is completely blocked and you can’t breathe properly, when there’s something genuinely uncomfortable lodged in your teeth, when you need to clear your throat and there’s nowhere private to do it—these moments reveal something fundamental about the tension between our biological reality and our social aspirations.

I find there’s something almost admirable about people who handle these moments with grace. The person who acknowledges that they need to take care of something and does so efficiently and discretely, without making a big production of it, demonstrates a kind of practical wisdom that’s worth emulating.

On the other hand, watching someone torture themselves to avoid a moment of social awkwardness can be its own form of social discomfort. We’ve all been in situations where someone is clearly dealing with some kind of hygiene issue but refusing to address it out of propriety, creating a weird tension where everyone is aware of the problem but pretending not to be.

The Democracy of Bodily Functions

What’s ultimately most fascinating about this question is how it reveals the fundamental democracy of human biology. No matter how sophisticated we become as a society, no matter how refined our social graces or advanced our technology, we’re all still walking around in bodies that occasionally need maintenance in ways that don’t align perfectly with social expectations.

The CEO picking their nose in their corner office, the teenager discretely dealing with a popcorn kernel between their teeth during a movie, the parent who needs to spit but can only find a plant to use as cover—we’re all just humans trying to navigate the gap between biological reality and social ideals.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the occasional lapse in perfect public hygiene behavior isn’t a sign of declining civilization but rather a reminder that we’re all still fundamentally human, still dealing with the same basic biological maintenance issues that have been part of the human experience since we first started gathering in groups large enough to develop social norms.

The Wisdom of Tactical Discretion

The real skill isn’t avoiding these behaviors entirely—that’s probably impossible for most people over the course of a lifetime. The real skill is developing what I think of as tactical discretion: the ability to handle necessary biological maintenance efficiently and with minimal social disruption.

This means checking your surroundings before acting, understanding your audience, and handling whatever needs to be handled with the minimum necessary drama. It means not making other people uncomfortable with your comfort, but also not torturing yourself to maintain an impossible standard of constant propriety.

Most importantly, it means accepting that everyone else is dealing with the same biological realities you are, which makes the occasional witnessing of someone else’s hygiene moment an opportunity for grace rather than judgment.

After all, we’re all just trying to get through our days with reasonable comfort and dignity. Sometimes that means acknowledging that perfect public presentation and human biology don’t always align perfectly, and that’s fine.

The person who can navigate this reality with humor, discretion, and occasional solidarity—like giving a thumbs up to a colleague who just got caught launching a snot rocket in a parking lot—might be onto something worth emulating.

Living with Biological Honesty

In the end, perhaps the most interesting thing about this question isn’t the specific behaviors it asks about, but what it reveals about our relationship with the gap between who we aspire to be and who we actually are in our most unguarded moments.

We can pretend to be people who never need to address basic biological maintenance in less-than-ideal circumstances, or we can accept that being human sometimes means making the best of imperfect situations with whatever discretion and grace we can manage.

I’d rather be honest about the occasional need for emergency nose-clearing or tooth maintenance than pretend I’m somehow above such earthly concerns. There’s something refreshing about acknowledging our shared humanity, even when that humanity occasionally involves behaviors that wouldn’t make it into an etiquette manual.

Besides, life is complicated enough without adding the pressure of maintaining perfect hygiene performance at all times. Sometimes you need to pick your nose, and sometimes people see you do it, and sometimes the best response is just to laugh and move on.

What about you? Do you ever find yourself engaging in these behaviors in public? How do you navigate the balance between biological necessity and social expectations? And what’s your policy when you witness someone else’s moment of hygiene honesty? Share your thoughts in the comments—I’m curious to hear how others handle the delicate dance between human biology and social propriety.