Every so often a situation leaves me thinking that I live on a different planet to the rest of humanity. I still recall one occasion during a choir rehearsal when the Star Wars movies came up in conversation. It was clear that every other member was animated and engaged by the topic, while I sat in bemused silence, having never seen any of the films and not really understanding why anyone would want to. It sticks in my memory because these were people who I thought were like me; many were of my own generation and level of education and experience and of course we shared a common passion for singing early music. I went home pondering my weirdness.
I have similar experiences whenever I am with my wife’s extended family, as I was last weekend. On these occasions I can use my excuse of demographics, because I am one of the few who is not of Philippine extraction and few of the group are close to my age. But even so my weirdness always strikes me at these gatherings, as I sit patiently at the side of conversations I don’t really relate to. Shopping is always one topic of difference; for many of the group an afternoon at an outlet mall is their idea of heaven, while for me it is much closer to hell.
This week I have decided that my conclusion is rather lazy, and I should challenge it, I came up with three sub-questions. Am I truly weird? If so, how did that happen? And does it matter?
I think I can answer the last sub-question first. I don’t think it matters at all. Why should it matter, since variety is the spice of life? I have the blessing of a reasonable level of self-confidence, so I don’t go around equating weirdness to abnormality or inferiority or suffering attacks of anxiety or depression. Perhaps this self-confidence is one explanation for the weirdness itself since I don’t go out of my way to conform. I feel that I have a full enough social life, including the blessing of love from many sources. And I don’t think my weirdness, such as it is, creates an unacceptable challenge to others – I don’t go around groping or fighting or (nowadays) bullying. True, I find it difficult to contribute to some conversations and in some events, but I generally have the patience to sit to the side when that happens; I have always been blessed by a contentment with my own company; perhaps that forms another licence for weirdness.
For the first sub-question, I am probably not very weird at all, and it can be a bit arrogant to lazily live in a mindset that I am. As humans, we are all remarkably different to each other, and therein lies our magic.
In vaguely stressful situations, we can convince ourselves that we are strange or don’t fit in. I used to hate going to the sort of parties where you stand around making conversation with people you don’t know very well with a drink in your hand. I always felt that I was the only one standing around on my own, shunned by everybody else and too inadequate to be worthy of anyone wanting to converse with me.
After suffering through this on many occasions, I made some resolutions. First, I would not be desperate. Unless there were people I knew or people inviting me to join a group, I would be content to stay on the side and be patient. I realised soon enough that nobody was looking at me or humiliating me, and that it would not be long before some kind soul would come and talk to me. Secondly, while alone I consciously observed other people. Surely enough I always discovered that a large minority of other party guests were in the same boat as me, nervously alone and afraid to mingle. Indeed this held true for most of the guests who were not in groups of friends who they arrived with. I was not unusual at all! After a while I could even summon the courage the approach some of these people myself. Now, while I can’t say I actively enjoy such gatherings, they no longer fill me with dread.
I can us the same techniques in other situations to test out the extent of my weirdness, and they always yield the same answer, that I am not weird at all. It may seem as though everybody else at a gathering has common interests that diverge completely from my own, but that is misleading. There are always others on the sides, I do not stick out as an aberration, and if I am patient and make some effort then I can find others who are a bit like me in some respect.
So I am not so weird after all, and when I convince myself that I am weird, it is often displaying an arrogant superiority complex. Look, everybody else is obsessed with their phone, and cannot stop themselves taking mindless photos, and display countless other pieces of evidence of their inferiority! Clearly this is not a healthy way to be thinking.
So I am not uniquely weird, but in fact everybody is weird, in that we all have our unusual traits. At last, this gives me a healthy place to explore the second sub-question. What are my most unusual traits, and how might I have acquired them?
In a random group of a hundred people, like in the game show, where would I be in a class of one? There is the Star Wars thing, to which could be added an animated or superhero movie, indeed any movie not about credibly real people doing credibly real things. What else? Among those with smart phones, mine probably has fewer photos stored than any of the other ninety-nine, and I probably care less than any of the others about how I might look in a photo. I probably spend less time scrolling my phone and grazing material such as ads, social media, celebrity gossip, or news than any of the others too. I am also probably the most cynical and resistant when it comes to brands and product claims. In Trader Joe (a rare brand that I somewhat trust) I will consciously choose the items not labelled as organic, because I do not trust the claims or marketing and link the word “organic” only to the word “overpriced”.
How did this all happen? There are bound to be a million reasons, but I think I have discovered two critical ones.
The clue to the first root cause comes from thinking about the person I know who displays most of the same unusual traits. That person is my sister. And the common link is our mother. As the excellent Progressive ads like to tell us, we all turn into our parents eventually, and that is an especially painful realisation for both me and my sister, because we both struggle to admire our (deceased) mum. But my paragraph of strange traits matches her character very closely. She hated all films. She cared not a jot for grooming or appearance. She shopped only on price and was acutely cynical about brand claims. My sister and I both love certain types of film but the other traits have been passed on, by the magic combination of genetics and environment. We are both turning into our mother, and we would be smart not to deny it.
The trait missing from mum’s personality is the one about grazing and celebrity. Mum devoured the Daily Mail each day and tracked TV celebrity gossip avidly. So that tendency must come from somewhere else. In my case, I suspect the key factor was living in countries where I did not speak the native language between 1996 and 2012, the period when information became ubiquitous and visual and when smartphones and social media took off.
During this time, I lived in countries where English was spoken well. As someone too lazy to learn local languages very well, I did not lack for much. But I was somewhat removed from the culture, and the gossip. I always would claim that I could follow a conversation but could never get the jokes. Social media and celebrity culture depend on such nuance.
Perhaps to compensate, I got into the habit of doubling down on deep content. I follow sports, but the whole long game rather than the highlight reels. I read The Economist and Guardian Weekly from cover to cover but barely glance at the pictures and have become very cynical of other sources. I blog, but resolutely (stubbornly?) refuse to include any pictures.
I am pleased that I took the time this week to ponder the questions about weirdness more deeply. The conclusions are clear. I am weird, but so is everybody else, and that is OK, indeed wonderful (though no cause for arrogance). Cocktail party survival techniques are valuable. One advantage of living in a large city where I speak the native language is that I can find others who share most of my weird passions, should I wish to. And, should we care, we can probably trace a lot of our own weirdness to a handful of root causes.
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