Sometimes I feel sad for genuinely eccentric young people today. Society today is all about embracing your individuality and becoming the most authentic version of yourself.
I grew up in the suburbs in Oklahoma. Most of my neighbors were Ned Flanders types. Or sometimes more like Hank Hill types. They were nice, but they had very strong opinions about how things ought to be and how people should comport themselves.
Therefore if you did something to stand out, you actually got a reaction from people. You got their disapproval.
The thing is, it was still possible to become the most authentic version of yourself. There was nothing actually stopping you. You just had to give the finger to everyone. Metaphorically. Or literally if that was how you wanted to roll.
This had two big added benefits: since you had to give the finger to everyone, you had a sense of accomplishment that you had earned something. And you got to freak out the squares, which is always great fun.
On the other hand, if you didn’t want to stand out, there was this nice pre-packaged way of presenting yourself which pretty much guaranteed that nobody would pay you a second look. It’s very easy to underestimate the advantages of this kind of easy anonymity.
The losers in this system were the people who might have liked to stand out, but didn’t quite have the courage to rock the boat and didn’t want to give the finger to anyone. Although one could argue that this was, in fact, their most authentic self: the ambivalent conformist.
Then there were the involuntary nonconformists, the ones who would have liked to fit in but couldn’t, just because they were incorrigibly socially awkward.
This system was particularly cruel to them, although in the “be your most authentic self” world we now inhabit, nobody quite knows how to deal with anyone. The socially awkward probably have it harder today.
It would be great if everyone were really free to live their most authentic selves, but we’re not. We’ve replaced a few hard, fast rules for how you should be living with a myriad of subtle, nuanced rules. Anyone who couldn’t get the old system figured out will be completely lost in the new system, and nobody will quite be able to say what they’re doing wrong.
But today’s eccentrics are the ones who are really missing out. And not just because it’s a joy to freak out the squares. It’s also that you learned that there are some people — possibly most of the people you know — whose opinion you have no reason to care about, whose approval you might actively want to avoid.
Well, the squares are still out there, but everyone is so atomized and segregated among like-minded people, you never have to interact with the squares.
But sometimes your real identity comes out by who you’re in opposition to. Would Bender in The Breakfast Club be Bender if he didn’t have Assistant Principal Vernon to interact with? Maybe, maybe not. It’s certain that his lines wouldn’t have been as funny.
Then there’s just the practicality of it. It’s really hard to do anything to stand out these days. In the 80s, it was as easy as wearing your baseball hat backwards. Seriously, unless you were playing catcher, that’s all you had to do to be considered someone who “plays by his own rules”.
Today, since everyone is supposedly playing by their own rules, nobody’s going to curse you for being your own person.
But nobody’s going to admire you for it, either. And that, more than anything else, is why I feel bad for the eccentrics today.
POSTSCRIPT:
I’m thinking about this, it occurred to me that I was really fortunate on my timing. I came of age when the “embrace your true self” movement was starting to catch on, but before it had completely taken over.
So while eccentric types like myself had some social opprobrium to contend with, that’s about as bad as it got. If I had graduated ten or twenty years earlier, my social life would have been considerably more isolated, and I literally would probably have gotten the shit kicked out of me on a fairly regular basis.
And make no mistake: I would have gotten the shit kicked out of me. While I embraced nonconformity, I would have struggled to fit in if I really had to.
And since standing out it wasn’t as risky as people thought it was, I probably got credit for being more courageous than I was.
