Weirdness (The pursuit of being everything we are not)

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Dear friend and Ponderer,

I am a strange dude.  I think I’ve written to you under the moniker ‘dude’ as it is mostly an unspectacular term for an individual.  So there is a bit of a paradoxical nature in how I perceive myself; such paradoxical qualities apply to just about everyone. I am both unique and unpredictable to those who don’t know me, but am also rather ordinary. I think our ordinariness comes from the culture and social constructs that are so influential in our lives. They shape us from an early age and we hardly notice these molding forces. Certain behaviors and personality traits seem programmed to guide me as if on the rails at a Disney Land ride.  I wake up in the morning, I eat eggs or toast for breakfast (pancakes, etc).  I listen to music that other people have also heard (some popular, some more obscure). I watch movies, I have a Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and Twitter account.  I try to make my bed, wear jeans, trim my beard, brush my teeth, nod at people I do not know, say “excuse me” and “my bad”.  If I were walking on a busy sidewalk, I don’t think I’d appear all that interesting to a random passerby.
But to complete this strange dichotomy of being ordinary and unique, I must also have my share of quirks along with rather eclectic tastes.  I listen to metal, rap, underground hip hop, electronic, indie dream pop, grunge, 90’s alternative, hard rock, psychedelia…really this list could be endless. It’s a scatter shot of interest. I play basketball, write a philosophy blog, take and post pictures of my cat, Raelyn, have written and in turn rapped lyrics on 2 or 3 original tracks with a good friend. If someone were to browse my feed they would see things that range from rants on society to memes about the NBA playoffs, expressing my enjoyment for playing RPG video games with my partner, to near pathological fascination with dark television dramas (Hannibal, Breaking Bad, True Detective). Hopefully this illustrates my point.

It is definitely common (ordinary) for us all to put on that we are different from everyone else. Usually the manner in which we try to portray our uniqueness is an attempt to seem spectacular or endlessly interesting. I’m sure I am motivated by this to some extent.  But mostly I feel like the stuff I share with my friends and on this blog are issues, ideas, and observations that I genuinely feel compelled to discuss. I once wrote a blog which described how ripping CD’s for people was a way that I expressed love. Ripping CD’s (talk about the stone age). I feel similarly about my drive towards philosophy and social commentary. When I read something interesting or see a great film, I feel compelled to share that with people. I think it is one of the ways that I know how to show love. I share in hopes that what I have  experienced might be the catalyst for someone else coming upon something new and novel.  Maybe thinking a thought they hadn’t thought before. Similarly, I utilize social media and technology in hopes that the people I know and respect might open my eyes to the peculiar, strange, or intriguing aspects of life that I have forgotten or never considered.  

People have gotten awful cynical about the internet and the public nature of our lives in modern society. I am included among those who at times is luke-warm about these trends.  But sharing and seeing what others are doing as they live life can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Our ordinariness helps us feel a sense of belonging, our uniqueness allows us to absorb this absurd, strange, and awesome sojourn on earth in a way that no one else can or ever will.  

Hopefully…contemplatively,
Some Dude

Dear friend and Dude,

Aw, the conundrum of “weird.” This, in itself, is a weird concept. People tend to devote so much of their lives to the pursuit of overt uniqueness. Before we can understand what it means to be “weird,” we must first ask: from where does this desire originate?

In my life, many times, I have been perceived by others as quite strange. This has only ever occurred, however, when people came to know me on a deeper level than what a person would observe from a superficial encounter. Only intimacy facilitated such awareness on the observers behalf. The things I did and the thoughts I thought that were perceived by others as “weird” all seemed ordinary to me. These were the things in my life which brought me passion, and they are all things that provide me enough intrepidity to move onward from one day to the next. Because these things and ideas are so significant and prevalent in my life, I ask you: are they actually weird? Is a person being in tune with their authentic self a weird thing, or is it possibly the most normal thing we could do?

To me, the weirdest things in my life are all the things that other people perceive as “normal.” The veneer I create to fit within the parameters of how I believe people expect me to behave, in my opinion, is abnormal and weird. Trying to convince people that I am weird because I believe other people will perceive it as admiral, is weird. Living for reasons other than one’s self, is weird, and more than that, it is destructive and leads to dissatisfaction.

This veneer of normality of which I speak is more easily described as our “egos.” Stated differently: the normalcy of the personality we develop and confine ourselves to for the sole reason of complying with societal norms is what I consider to be weird, or more appropriately, nonsensical. It’s weird AND it’s duplicitous. Our egos are not who we are. Our egos are our alternative personalities that we create to distract society from ever seeing who we really are, because we fear that outsiders will judge our passions as “weird” or, more appropriately, “flawed.” How weird is it that in a life as short as the lives we are granted, we spend so much of our time trying to be people whom we are not? This, my friend, is weird.

Have you ever bought a shirt or anything similar, not because it was attractive to you, but because it was attractive to a person you love and spend time with? This is one easy (and simple) example of how we disregard our true self to satisfy others. Imagine this article of clothing is your ego. Imagine over some period of time, you buy more clothing that you have little interest for, but you believe they fit within the confines of how your girlfriend or others expect you to appear. Every time you look in the mirror and see yourself wearing this shirt, would you not question your motives? As the shirt grew old, and in seeking further approval from your girlfriend, you buy an entire wardrobe to match your outdated shirt — would you not eventually grow to lose a sense of what clothing might better complement your own tastes? Would you not grow to resent yourself as you became increasingly veiled in costumes you wore for others? Is this not weird behavior, but not for the conventional reasons people would consider something to be weird?

With all the things you do in your life, please ask yourself: who am I doing those things for? Our “weirdness;” the genuine weirdness; the weirdness that stems from deep within — can just as easily be identified as our passion, because that is what it is. In my opinion, this is the only way to live one’s life. So next time you buy a shirt, be certain it is a shirt you can bear to look at when you look in the mirror. When you post to Facebook, ask yourself if you are posting because you genuinely enjoy sharing with friends, or if you are more concerned about designing your Facebook page to be impressive or enviable or self-victimizing or… you get the point.

Am I weird? I try not to be weird anymore, because I fucking hate my ego. Am I passionate? I like to think “yes.”

Sincerely, A Ponderer
Dear Ponderer,

I hadn’t considered how very odd trying to fit in actually is until you described it in the fashion that you did. We do some outright absurd things to keep up with the Jones’s, to ensure that we are not “lonely”, to “please” those we associate with. This doesn’t always come from a place of self denial or insecurity, however. This human tendency for people pleasing and sticking to and perpetuating societal norms is also driven by fear.  Fear of putting ourselves out there and being misunderstood.  And when people are misunderstood by society, they can very often be forgotten…or worse, mistreated and oppressed. Instant gratification entices us to build up a personality that the system can deem as predictable. What is predictable can be quantified. With relative confidence we can be sure that predictability will follow the rules, punch their time card at the end of the day, take out their loans, swipe their credit cards, flock to the latest superhero film, and will only question their political opponents while forgetting to question the larger structures of authority.

Forgive me if this has wandered off the original discussion a bit, so let me bring it back to this idea of being both ordinary and unique.  It is okay to be human and to survive and to seek the company of others. But it is all too easy to get swept up and forget our passions. And even more concerning is seeing those who from a very young age have had rigid ideas of who they are supposed to be hoisted upon them and were unable to explore the paradoxical and wondrous nature of their humanity.  We are not a fixed point, growth is essential to fulfillment.  We are the same as others because the struggle of life for each individual naturally has shared qualities. However, the way in which we experience live and how we live it becomes our biological signature writ large for others to see.  It is my hope that we will no longer sign on the lines, neatly, or in print.

Bigotry Towards the Bigots (When the Method Ruins Our Intent)

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Dear Dude,

I must admit, I wrote you a letter the other day about my issues with compulsion and impulsivity and decided, in light of this Donald Sterling situation, that I might be able to make my own issues more relatable to others. In the letter I disclosed the embarrassing details about my having derogatory words pass through my mind during times of anxiety as of late. In it I told about the way these words were rarely, if ever, applicable to the people propelling my anxiety. This has caused me to ponder the possibility of these words being nothing more than manifestations in my mind created by the cheap outlets society provides us to express anger. I can’t help but think that when I’ve thought prejudice words, it’s more likely a product of my environment than irrational hate. This was never an issue for me before moving to the East Coast, where words like: ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ and ‘slut’ run rampant. From my observation, most East Coasters that use those words don’t intend explicit hatred.  It seems to be more a function of ignorance or cultural normalcy than anything else.

Going back to the Donald Sterling situation, I must ask how it is that you discern between a person’s ignorance and a person’s hate? It seems that some of the people recently exposed and exploited by the media as racist (Sterling and Clive Bundy) exude as much ignorance as they do hatred. Maybe at this junction in their lives these people are too stubborn in their ways to change their views, but hypothetically, if they were/are able to change their thinking, do you think exploiting these folks and creating a din of 24/7 news cycle moral outrage is really the best approach?

I find myself consumed by stories about people making derogatory remarks on twitter or some other social media controversy and I ask myself: is this the way these people sincerely perceive things? Or are these people acting on compulsive thoughts by following a script designed by social constructs? Are people getting some sense of self-righteousness by witnessing and exploiting these acts? It seems as though we are exploiting people in need of help or guidance rather than striking at the roots of our prejudice. Is our utilitarian approach of making examples of people really just a veil of holiness to disguise selfish intentions? Or are things like social media such an enigma in its fairly early stages of existence that we don’t know how to properly utilize them?

When I wasn’t much younger than I am now, but far more destructive, I would regularly act impulsively. When my wrong ways of thinking were exposed by people, whether or not it was done with the intention of helping me to see things different, because of the harsh and snarky manners in which they sometimes rebuked me (and vice-versa), any good intentions would often have a reverse effect. Instead of helping each other to reconsider our ways of thinking, we treated all matters as cause/effect — justifying all our own actions because we considered each other to be the cause. I don’t know the effect this had on others, but for me, this perpetuated my compulsive tendencies and pushed me further down that slippery slope road of ignorance and hate. In hindsight, I see how much of my behavior was a survival mechanism — me laying down the first metaphorical bricks to protect my ego. From there on I laid brick after brick to further protect myself and to resist the possibility of admitting that my thinking might be wrong. It was a chaotic and irrational time, and the further I delved into these patterns, the more dependent I became on my brick wall. Eventually the internal damage became clear. My wall fragile and crumbling, more like glass than bricks.

Sincerely, A Ponderer

 

Dear Ponderer,

I am pleased to broach this subject, if only to have the opportunity to examine some of the strides I’ve made personally with regards to prejudice. I find that the psychological principle at play here is fairly clear.  It’s overcoming it that is so complex.  What’s apparent to me about how people build up casual prejudice or focused hatred for other people or groups of people is that it most often comes from a place of insecurity (ego protection).  Because seeing it as so personal is quite uncomfortable, the tendency seems for people to project this into a larger narrative where their scorn or superiority is associated with a collective. Examples being anti-western sentiment or polarization between political parties. I took part in this on many levels growing up, but I’m certainly not unique in having experienced this. This is to say, that even at 80 years old, Donald Sterling has a genesis to why he said the disgusting things he uttered in private.  Abhorrent things, for sure, but things that I didn’t enjoy seeing aired out in a public forum in the fashion that it was, nor did it make me feel morally resolute.  For lack of a better word and at risk of sounding somewhat infantile, the whole thing made me feel icky.  

Now we have a new mob, much more holy in its appearance, but I believe it is similarly driven by insecurity.  When I started to overcome some of my more ignorant attitudes and prejudices from my teenage years, I bounced around to a number of new philosophies and mindsets that, looking back now, were just me finding new ways to feel, superior.  Social media is becoming a feeding frenzy of moral outrage and disgust, and as you say, it’s turned into outright exploitation of people who, while certainly doing or saying horrible and strange things, are still people and are likely damaged souls.  We are becoming bigoted towards the bigots.  And while it may be a more noble in the strictly utilitarian sense, I feel this only creates a trend towards further polarization…a greater desire for people to dig in and entrench themselves in their faulty prejudices towards others.

No coincidence how my mind always seems to return to compassion as a solution.  I might also add gratitude. I am grateful that I have been able to discard many of my misguided ways of thinking from the past, and thus I should understand how it is that others might still marginalize people as a means of ego preservation. I can’t even say that I’m completely free of this human tendency.  It is, I would posit, a part of our evolutionary software; to hate the other tribes.  What does this all mean?  We need a softer approach, patience with the fickle nature of our humanity.  We have come a long way towards learning how to be self aware as individuals and a society, but it also feels like where one door opens to the light, others close and new paradoxes present themselves.  So again, compassion.  And if we are going to have such fangs for those who don’t jive with the new morality, we need to also remain aware of our continuing social injustices, lest we begin to demonstrate our glaring hypocrisies (as if we haven’t already).  Making examples out of the bigots, while systemically modern manifestations of our tribal nature persist.  

Thoughtfully,

Some Dude

 

Brief Response:

Dear Dude,

Even Sterling has a genesis — how very true. I was fortunate in being able to start breaking down my own ego over the past year as result of certain circumstances. You’re absolutely right about the ego’s purpose being to protection one’s insecurities. It seems that bigotry towards the bigot is no real resolution or means of progress. It’s a less obvious disparity in compassion, but disparity nonetheless. Any disparity we maintain ultimately discourages people from breaking down their egos and — by reinforcing such a stigma around admitting “wrong,” by celebrating self-righteousness — we perpetuate unwillingness to change ways of thinking. It seems worth mentioning that the other day, when mentioning my compulsive issue with you and another friend with similar issues to mine, I have been able to more rationally understand the reason for this problem’s existence. This understanding has naturally led to a cessation of the problem. Like you mentioned — compassion. Thank you for your response.

Take care to take care,

Ponderer